m?. 





M" mus 











FROM PAN A 



ERNEST PEIXOTTi 




BOOKS BY ERNEST PEIXOTTO 

PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



EACH VOLUME ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR 

PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA. 

(Postage extra) net, $2.50 

BY ITALIAN SEAS net, 2.50 

THROUGH THE FRENCH PROVINCES, net, 2.50 

ROMANTIC CALIFORNIA net. 2.50 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2010 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/pacificshoresfro01peix 







Plaza, San Francisco, Lima 



PACIFIC SHORES 
FROM PANAMA 



BY 
ERNEST PEIXOTTO 



ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR 

i 




NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

MCMXIII 



FZ Z 13 



Copyright, 1913, by 

Charles Scribner's Sons 



Published October, 1913 




©CI.A354657 
/ 



PREFACE 

Spanish America of the Pacific still remains one of 
the few countries undiscovered by the tourist. The 
few foreigners who use the steamers that slowly 
meander up and down its coast are for the most part 
commercial travellers, mining engineers, or a stray 
missionary or archaeologist. The few books that 
have been written about it — and they are very few 
indeed — deal with the region from one or the other 
of these view-points. 

But no book that I have been able to find treats 
of it as a journey of recreation, a quest for the knowl- 
edge usually to be obtained by travel. Yet viewed 
from this stand-point alone, it is a truly fascinating 
voyage. The luxurious indolence that possesses the 
traveller as he glides over this lazy tropical sea, the 
romance of the Spanish cities, the picturesqueness 
and the appeal of its vast Indian population, the 
desolation of its arid wastes, the dizzy heights of its 
Cordillera, the sharp contrast of climate and vegeta- 
tion — where equatorial tropics and eternal snows are 



PREFACE 

often but a few hours apart — all these make up a 
journey, the fascination of which can scarcely be 
overstated. And it is my belief that with the open- 
ing of the Panama Canal this West Coast will be- 
come a favourite winter cruise for the people of our 
hemisphere. 

Living, outside of the larger cities, is primitive, to 
be sure. But where is the seasoned traveller who 
would let that deter his ardour? And even as it is 
the hotels are no better and no worse than they are 
in towns of the same relative importance in Italy or 
Spain. The railroads are well equipped for the most 
part with American rolling-stock, the people cour- 
teous, kind, and well-disposed toward the stranger — 
if he will but meet them half-way. 

To properly appreciate the voyage one must have 
a taste for the novel and the untravelled; one must 
have an eye for the picturesque; and, above all, one 
must have read up the old Spanish chroniclers or at 
least Prescott's "Conquest of Peru," that still re- 
mains the vade-mecum of the traveller in the Andes. 
How strange, how wonderful that this blind his- 
torian, sitting in his library in Cambridge, could 
have grasped with such accuracy a country he had 



PREFACE 

never seen, describing its mountain fastnesses, its 
tropical valleys, the romance of its old Inca civilisa- 
tion, and the ardour of its Spanish conquerors as no 
one has been able to do before or since! 

To those who wish to pursue the subject further, 
I would suggest a perusal of the original story of the 
Conquest by Xeres, Pizarro's own secretary, and the 
Commentarios of Oviedo and Herrera, and the poetic, 
if sometimes exaggerated, accounts of Garcilasso de 
la Vega. 

I wish to express my sincerest thanks to the 
officials and captains of the Royal Mail Steam Packet 
Company, the Compania Sud-Americana de Vapores, 
and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, for their 
many kindnesses and courtesies; to the Peruvian 
Corporation, especially to its representative in Lima, 
Mr. W. L. Morkill, aptly called the "King of Peru," 
for the exceptional opportunities he gave us to see 
out-of-the-way places and interesting festivals with 
the comfort of a private car, and to the new-found 
friends in general who taught us what hospitality 
could mean to the stranger in a strange land. 

E. P. 

June, 1913. 

vii 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

TO THE SPANISH MAIN 1 

PANAMA 17 

DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 37 

LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 57 

THE OROYA RAILWAY— 

i. To the Roof of the World 79 

n. Xattxa and Htjancayo 87 

SOUTHERN PERU— 

i. A Coast Hacienda 103 

n. To Aeeqtjipa 116 

LA VILLA HERMOSA 125 

THE LAND OF THE INCAS 137 

CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 159 

LAKE TITICACA 193 

A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 203 

ix 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

THE RETURN TO PANAMA 227 

FROM THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE— 

i. In Central American Waters 235 

ii. Guatemala and Its Capital 247 

in. Coast Towns of Mexico 269 




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Plaza of San Francisco, Lima . . . Frontispiece 

PAGE 

Royal Palms, Nipe Bay, Cuba 7 

Negroes selling "Rope Tobacco" Kingston, Jamaica .... 13 

The Cathedral, Panama 25 

Avenida Central, Panama 29 

The Old Bells at Cruces 31 

Ruins of Old Panama 33 

Native Boats, Paita 45 

A Grated Veranda, Salaverry 52 

The Aguador Peddles His Donkey-Load of Water . . facing 52 

"Balcones," Lima 61 

Lima Cathedral from the Bodegones facing 62 

In the President's Garden 65 

Cloister of San Francisco, Lima 69 

xi 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



Patio of the Torre Tagle Palace, Lima facing 70 

Weighing-Post in the Torre Tagle Palace 73 

On the Oroya Railway facing 80 

The Narrow River Valley Like a Relief Map . . . facing 82 

Entrance to a Corral, Oroya 89 

The Plaza, Xauxa 91 

A Native Family, Huancayo 94 

Corner of the Indian Market, Huancayo 95 

Landing at Cerro Azul facing 104 

Bull Ring in the Cafiete Valley 113 

Hacienda of Unanue 114 

The Carrito and Its Galloping Mule facing 114 

The Port, Mollendo 119 

Nearing Arequipa facing 122 

The Cathedral from the Mercaderes . . 128 

The Cathedral and Chachani facing 130 

Court of a Residence facing 132 

Church of La Compafifa 133 

Arequipa from the Bridge across the Chili facing 134 

Entrance to the Old Bishop's Palace 135 

Pottery Vendors, Puchara 145 

At the Top of the Pass, La Raya facing 146 

The Llama Trains Were Already Arriving ..„.,... 148 

Corner of the Market, Sicuani ......... facing 150 

xii 



<4 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



Urcos facing 154 

General View of Cuzco . 163 

Old View of Cuzco after Ramusio's Woodcut 167 

Arco di Sta. Clara, Cuzco 169 

Inca Rocca's Palace facing 170 

Old Stone Model of Sachsahuaman 174 

Sachsahuaman facing 174 

Apse of Santo Domingo Built upon the Temple of the Sun . . 176 

Inca Stone Representing a Plan of the Temple of the Sun . . 178 

Plaza and Church of the Compafiia, Cuzco . 181 

Line the Arcades of the Plaza with Their Gaudy Wares . . . 187 

The Steep, Picturesque Streets that Climb the Hills .... 189 

Juliaca 196 

A Balsa on Lake Titicaca facing 200 

Ruins of Tiahuanaco 206 

Stone Image, Tiahuanaco 209 

A Llama Train on the Bolivian Highlands facing 214 

La Paz from the Alto facing 216 

Streets Plunge Down One Hill Only to Ascend Another . . . 217 

Old Courtyard, La Paz 219 

Group at the Market, La Paz facing 220 

An Aymara Musician 224 

In the Obrajes Valley facing 224 

The Plaza, Puno 230 

xiii 






LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



Watching the Lanchas 238 

The Mole, La Libertad 240 

Sonsonate facing 244 

Ploughing on Agua 249 

The Calvario, Guatemala City 255 

Cathedral Terrace, Guatemala City 256 

A Marimbero 257 

Indian Women 258 

Huts in the Jungle 262 

A Bullock Wagon, Salina Cruz 271 

Its Streets of Dazzling Colonnades 276 

Market Square, Acapulco facing 276 

An Outlying Street, Acapulco 277 

Manzanillo Bay 279 

A Tiny Pearl of the Tropics 280 

Old Church, San Bias 281 

Loading Barges, San Bias 283 



xiv 



TO THE SPANISH MAIN 



TO THE SPANISH MAIN 

WHAT could be more delightful, upon a 
cold February morning, than the pros- 
pect of a voyage to southern seas — with 
pleasant assurance that in a day or two you will ex- 
change the wintry blasts of the city streets for the 
soft trade-winds of the tropics, fanning your cheek 
and inviting you to languor and repose? 

The winter had been a particularly severe one. 
Ice-packs floated along beside us all the way down 
the bay, and even after we had left the harbour 
and dropped our pilot beyond the Hook, long floes 
stretched dazzling white along the horizon like 
beaches of glittering sand. 

As I looked about the deck I could scarcely realise 
that we were really headed for the Caribbean. These 
big Royal Mail packets, with their English officers 

[3] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

and their English stewards counting in shillings and 
pence, seemed more like transatlantic liners (which 
in reality they are, sailing for Southampton via the 
British possessions in the West Indies) than like the 
usual Panama steamers. 

We left upon a Saturday. All day Sunday we 
pounded the seas off Hatteras in a stiff sou'easter, 
but Monday morning dawned bright and clear, with 
a blue sea, diapered with those large saffron-coloured 
spots which come up the coast with the Gulf Stream. 

Already on Tuesday the breeze blew warmer and 
the first signs of tropical weather appeared among 
passengers and crew. Sailors and deck-boys shed 
shoes and stockings, the ladies donned lighter frocks, 
and the men were shod in white. Flying-fish skipped 
from wave to wave, glistening like dragon-flies in the 
sunlight. 

That afternoon we made our first land — a long 
island lying low upon the horizon, with a lighthouse 
at its highest point, Watling's Island, known to the 
Indians as Guanahuani. It was the landfall of 
Columbus upon his first blind voyage, the first bit of 
earth in the New World pressed by European feet, 
and was named by its discoverer San Salvador. Our 

[4] 



TO THE SPANISH MAIN 

captain described it as about twelve miles long and 
from five to seven wide, and one of the richest of the 
Bahama group. Its five hundred inhabitants keep 
in contact with the rest of the world only by means 
of a few coasters that now and then put into the little 
reef harbour at its northern end. In a few hours we 
sank it in the northwest and sighted no more land 
that day. 

When I looked out of my port-hole at dawn next 
morning, I could make out, between the pale-pink 
sky and the sea that lay calm and opalescent as a 
great pearl shell, a long grey streak that each mo- 
ment grew more distinct, gathering intensity and 
form, until presently a vivid shore of green, the 
freshest and brightest hue imaginable, gleamed along 
the horizon, and I realised that we were rapidly near- 
ing the coast of Cuba. 

The sun was just rising. I scurried into cool white 
linens and scrambled on deck just as we were thread- 
ing the narrow entrance into Nipe Bay. 

Upon the one hand stood a plantation set in gardens 
and fields of sugar-cane, and among thick clumps of 
palmettoes nestled a group of native huts thatched 
and wattled with grass. On the opposite shore the 

' [5] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

tall, column-like boles of a cluster of royal palms 
shone brilliantly against the distant mountains that, 
clear-cut and blue, wreathed their summits in thick 
clouds like the fumes of volcanoes, so heavy and 
motionless they lay. Even at this early hour a 
drowsy softness pervaded the air — a stillness that 
could be felt. Was it possible that we were but four 
days from the snow and sleet, the icy streets and 
blustering winds of New York City? 

Of course we landed here at Antilla, though there 
was nothing much to see. The usual mixture of the 
types and races of the torrid zone stood crowded 
upon the dock: a negress dressed in old-rose calico; 
a mestiza with tattooed arms and bony hands that 
clasped a manta round her yellow neck; black faces 
peering from the shade of purple and magenta hats, 
soldiers in khaki, custom-house officials in sky blue, 
and in the background a lumbering ox-cart dis- 
charging its load upon a waiting scow. 

We weighed anchor after luncheon, and all the 
afternoon skirted the north shore of Cuba. Ever 
since we left San Salvador we had followed in 
the wake of Columbus groping from coast to coast 
upon his first voyage. After landing at Guanahuani, 

[6] 



TO THE SPANISH MAIN 

he set sail southward to this north coast of Cuba, 
which he named Isabella, in honour of his queen, and 




Royal Palms, Nipe Bay, Cuba 

then, as we were now doing, he skirted its shore 
until he doubled Cape Maysi and saw Hayti, or Es- 

[7]' 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

panola, as he called it, rise from the sea to the east- 
ward. 

This Cuban coast is a long succession of beautiful 
blue mountains, finely drawn as the pencillings of an 
old Italian master, and as delicate in outline as the 
purple djebels of northern Africa. On the deck, 
every one was enjoying the balmy air and the pros- 
pect of the bright blue sea flecked with whitecaps. 
How different our passengers from the usual transat- 
lantic crowd, bundled in shawls and veils and heavy 
ulsters! Wraps had been discarded, and the ladies 
sat about in fresh white gowns and leghorn hats, just 
as they would on summer verandas. 

If the promenade-deck still looked Anglo-Saxon, 
not so the after-deck. Already it had caught the 
tropic atmosphere, for at Antilla we had taken 
aboard a crowd of Jamaican negroes as black as coal 
— the women lolling on the benches, the men half 
asleep in lavender shirts with their heads tied up in 
bandanas to ward off sea-sickness. In a corner a 
family had ensconced itself, rigging up a sort of tent 
made of counterpanes, one sky blue, one brick red, 
and the third an old-rose "spread" gaily figured with 
white. These were all tied together and their ends 

[8] 



TO THE SPANISH MAIN 

anchored to various articles of luggage, to the stan- 
chions of the deck above, or to the ship's benches. In 
the shade of these bellying draperies, yet fanned by 
the breeze, lay these West Indian darkies, a man and 
three women, their heads pillowed on bundles, he 
half covered with a table-cloth, his head near that 
of one of the women whose scarlet skirt was short 
enough to disclose the flounces of a well-starched 
petticoat and a pair of black slippers slashed over 
white stockings. From time to time another woman's 
hand would appear to smooth her wind-blown dra- 
peries or quiet the half -naked pickaninnies that wrig- 
gled and kicked about upon the deck beside her — an 
exotic picture, certainly, one to be painted by an 
impressionist with a broad brush and crude, primary 
colour. 

By evening we rounded Cape May si and steered 
southward through the Windward Passage. As our 
prow pointed toward the Caribbean, the romance of 
the Spanish Main seemed to fall about us with the 
deepening twilight. The furrows ploughed by the 
Spanish caravels have closed, to be sure, and no sign 
marks the pathway of their keels. Ashore, some old 
buildings on a battle-field, a bit of ruin or an aban- 

[9] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

doned road, mark the progress of history and supply 
the stepping-stones that link the past with the pres- 
ent; but at sea the waves fill in the furrows as quickly 
as they are ploughed. Yet the ghosts of the "high- 
charged" galleons seem to linger in the Caribbean, 
lurking behind the reefs of its islands, taking refuge 
in its harbours, or cresting the dancing whitecaps. In 
its ports the English and the French lay in wait for 
the Spanish argosies and Drake laid the foundation 
of England's supremacy on the sea, while over yonder 
in the lee of Cape Tiburon Morgan fitted out his ex- 
pedition of free-booters and buccaneers — the most 
lawless lot of rapscallions that ever assembled in all 
these pirate waters — for the sack of Panama. The 
flavour of their deeds still fingers in these archipel- 
agoes — on these shores shaded by cocoa-nut palms, 
in their bamboo-built hamlets, and in the little har- 
bours reefed about with coral. 

Toward noon next day, Jamaica's lovely coast rose 
over the starboard bow. As we drew nearer we 
could make out the gleaming fringes of breakers 
along the reefs and the low shores vivid with mangoes 
and palmettoes. Big, vaporous mountains, purple 
and crowned with cumuli, rose behind, full of mystery 

[10] 



TO THE SPANISH MAIN 

and charm. For hours we skirted this enchanting 
island. Then a lighthouse appeared with, near it, the 
wreck of a German liner breaking to pieces upon the 
treacherous sand — an accident that happened just 
after the last earthquake when the lighthouse was put 
out of commission. 

As we stood watching it we made out, in the surf 
near shore, a long-boat breasting the waves, now 
raised high in air upon their crests, now completely 
engulfed in the deeps between them. Its flags, fore 
and aft, stood taut in the clipping breeze, and as it 
approached we could see its oarsmen bending stur- 
dily over their sweeps. What a picture it made as it 
drew under the lee of our great bulk, the green boat in 
the lapis sea with its brawny negro rowers, whose bare 
legs and chests, wet with spray, gleamed like polished 
bronze! Bright bandanas were knotted about their 
heads, and their scant clothing, old and tattered, 
scarcely concealed their nakedness. In the stern- 
sheets sat a man who steered with one hand, while 
with the other he baled out the boat with a cocoa- 
nut shell. Now from such a boat would you not 
expect some John Hawkins or Captain Kidd to step 
forth? But the man in the stern proved only the 

[in 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

Kingston pilot as he clambered up the rope ladder 
to our deck. 

The boat remained bobbing in the sea as our 
engines started again, and supplied just the proper 
foreground note to this picture of old Port Royal that 
now began to unfold itself. On the shore side of the 
long sand-spit that shields the harbour from the in- 
roads of the sea, under the protection of the British 
flag, where the prim barracks are now lined up, the 
pirates of France and England used to careen and 
clean their ships and prepare themselves for their next 
bloody foray upon the Spanish settlements and the 
caravels taking the "King's Fifth" to Spain. 

As we rounded the end of the spit and Kingston's 
harbour opened before us, we could see the beaches 
where these pirates landed, laden with loot from the 
Isthmus, and swaggered up to the taverns to squander 
their doubloons and pieces-of -eight in riotous living. 
Here Mansvelt and Morgan replenished their crews 
and refitted their ships; here they joined forces with 
a fleet of fifteen vessels manned by five hundred men, 
and here to Port Royal Sir Henry Morgan returned 
after Mansvelt's death, for it was his ambition to 
consecrate this harbour as a " refuge and sanctuary for 

[12] 



TO THE SPANISH MAIN 



pirates" and a store-house for their spoils. Here, 
too, in this town of buccaneers, he planned his raids 



V & "it 







Negroes Selling "Rope Tobacco," Kingston, Jamaica 

on Cuba and the Gulf of Maracaibo, and hence he set 
sail to join the fleet that he had assembled off Hayti 
for his attack on Panama. 

[13] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

All these memories crowded my thoughts as we 
slowly steamed up to the Royal Mail dock, catching 
glimpses as we passed of the straight streets swarm- 
ing with people that lead up toward the vega, extend- 
ing soft, green, and tropical toward the mountains. 
The flimsy houses with low-pitched roofs, the cocoa- 
nut palms waving their long arms in the easterly 
trade-winds, the pelicans fishing in the bay, the 
Jamaican negroes that swarmed about the dock, the 
English-looking shops of the main street, — excellent 
emporia, by the way, for outfitting in the tropics, — 
these compose Kingston of to-day, just as they com- 
posed Kingston of yesterday. 

There is an excellent hotel, set in its own gardens, 
but unfortunately — or fortunately, I believe — there 
were no rooms to be had in it, so we tried a place in 
the town where we dined in a picturesque court with 
a fountain plashing beside us, a gaudy parrot in a 
silver cage moping among pale moon-flowers, a pair 
of doves cooing in a corner — a little place, in fact, 
whose romantic charm had caught even an old Civil 
War veteran, who somehow had been side-tracked 
here, and who after dinner tuned up his violin, or 
fiddle, as he called it, and played in the moonlight. 

[ 14 ] 



TO THE SPANISH MAIN 

Later we drove about in the darkness of the tropic 
night, catching glimpses of dimly lighted Rembrandt- 
esque figures seated in open doorways or working 
in shops lit by flickering lamps. 

There were the Hope Gardens and the markets to 
be visited next morning, and at two o'clock we left 
for the south. The governor had come aboard to 
see off some distinguished friends, and the English 
element became even more pronounced among the 
passengers. Army officers in khaki greeted each 
other as Sir John and Sir William, and dinner-coats 
became the rule after sundown. 

Saturday we spent on the high seas, lashed by the 
"doctor," as the Jamaicans call this brisk trade-wind 
that kicks up such a swell in the Caribbean— a wind, 
as the captain expressed it, that "sometimes blows 
the bananas off the trees"; and he was authority, too, 
for the following verse, showing that in February we 
were only seeing the "doctor" at his feeblest: 

"June too soon; 
July stand by; 
August look out; 
September remember; 
October all over." 

[15] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

Before dawn on Sunday morning I saw a light- 
house blinking on a headland, and the dark moun- 
tains behind Porto Bello loomed faint and grey 
against the sky. Then all sign of land disappeared 
for a while, until a tropical shore, flooded in the rosy 
sunrise, suffused in humid atmosphere, appeared 
resting on a turquoise sea. A long break-water lay 
to the right, a number of docks to the left. We were 
passed by the business-like Canal Zone doctor and 
soon were setting foot upon the Isthmus. 



[16] 



PANAMA 



PANAMA 

"Then, go away if you have to go 
Then, go away if you will! 
To again return you will always yearn 
While the lamp is burning still! 

"You've drank the Chagres water, 
And the mango eaten free, 
And, strange though it seems, 'twill haunt your 
dreams, 
This Land of the Cocoanut Tree!" 

HOW true this verse from "Panama Patch- 
work," penned by poor James Gilbert, who 
lost his life by dwelling too long under the 
spell of the Isthmus — which is scarcely to be won- 
dered at, for his "Land of the Cocoanut Tree" cer- 
tainly exerts a strange and potent fascination. 

The achievements of its intrepid discoverers and 
conquistadores ; the romantic episodes of its treasure- 
trains laden with the wealth of Peru; the bloody raids 
of the buccaneers; the onward rush to the gold-fields 

[19] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

of California — all these and, finally, the digging of 
the great canal compose a historic background such 
as few countries can boast. 

Every great personage of early American history 
has imprinted his footsteps upon its red clay soil. 
In his futile search for the Straits — the mythical 
Stretto Cubitoso that never could be found — Colum- 
bus beat along its coast, and Colon and Cristobal, the 
Atlantic entrance to the canal, perpetuate his mem- 
ory. From a hill in Darien, Balboa first beheld the 
Pacific, and the Pacific gateway to the canal will 
hand down his name to posterity. Pizarro and Cor- 
tez waged their first battles along its sandy shores 
and slew the Indians in its treacherous jungles. Her- 
nando de Soto made it the theatre of his first ex- 
plorations and there prepared himself for the dis- 
covery of the Mississippi. Sir Francis Drake sailed 
his first boat, the Swan, in the troubled waters that 
wash its shores, and Henry Morgan harassed its 
coast-towns in his bloodiest forays. De Lesseps, 
hero of Suez, went down to defeat before its fevers 
and the crooked administration of his company. 
Finally, American enterprise, triumphing over all 
obstacles, has here given its best account of the 

[20] 



PANAMA 

value of collective endeavour and carried through 
the dream of centuries, the greatest achievement of 
mankind. . . . 

The town of Colon, though attractive enough when 
viewed from the harbour, is disappointing upon closer 
acquaintance. Its straight streets, flanked by two- 
storied houses, shaded above and below by broad 
verandas, remind one, to be sure, of some old town 
of Spanish California, but little tempts to linger. So, 
without regret, in a tumble-down cab we followed our 
luggage (given in charge to a turbaned East Indian) 
from the dock to the railroad station. 

The ride to Panama proved full of interest. When 
we crossed upon this occasion the new line of the 
Panama Railway through the Black Swamp had just 
been opened, so that, beyond Gatun from the car- 
windows, we enjoyed rare glimpses of the virgin jun- 
gle, a tropical hortus of blooming trees, with orchids 
and flowering vines draped in their branches, hung 
amid screens of convolvuli and creepers as intricate 
as the pendent cords of Japanese curtains. Cane 
huts, primitive as those pictured by the old chroni- 
clers in the woodcuts of their first editions, basked 
in the shade of cocoa-nut palms. 

[21] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

It was a Sunday, and at each station little parties 
of holiday-makers — engineers, army officers in im- 
maculate white with their fresh young wives — came 
aboard or dropped off to see friends at the different 
camps. 

Each station had a physiognomy of its own. Fri- 
joles was a collection of negro cabins clustered about 
a primitive church; Matachin a railroad junction; 
Camp Elliott an army post, smart, spick, and span; 
Las Cascadas a steaming centre of locomotives and 
car shops; Culebra a thriving-looking place where, 
through the open church windows, we could see the 
congregation at prayer. 

At many of the turns we had views of the canal 
work. Gatun Locks and the Spillway lay near the 
road, and the broad artificial lake formed by the 
dammed-up Chagres River spread its placid waters 
to shores adorned with bouquets of cocoa-nut trees 
and graceful palms. But after Culebra little verdure 
was to be seen. Later the great locks of Pedro 
Miguel and Miraflores appeared to the right, and 
finally Ancon Hill rose behind the Tivoli lying close 
to the track in the foreground. 

Thus in a little less than two hours we had accom- 

[m] 



PANAMA 

plished the journey across the continent from ocean 
to ocean, the only place upon the hemisphere where 
it is now possible to behold both oceans in a single 
day. 

And how different the journey nowadays from what 
it used to be! When Balboa set out to find the 
South Sea he forced his way for twenty-six days 
through the trackless jungle before he reached the 
hill from which he first beheld the Pacific. Morgan 
and his buccaneers almost lost their lives while on 
their way to sack Old Panama, poling up the Chagres 
River to Venta Cruz, wading waist high through the 
swamps; cutting their way painfully with machetes 
through the pulpy undergrowth, attacked by mosqui- 
toes and jiggers and Indians with poisoned arrows; 
hearing the strange quick cry of the "chicaly" bird 
or the "corrosou tolling his bell-like notes"; watching 
the monkeys play "a thousand antick Tricks" in the 
branches above their heads. What strange dreams 
must have haunted their superstitious minds! What 
fears must have racked their bodies, wasted by hunger 
and disease! In desperation they were forced to 
eat the leather of their clothing and accoutrements, 
stripped and pounded upon stones, and when, on 

[23] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

the sixth day, they fell upon a barn full of maize, 
they devoured it dry and raw. 

Such was crossing the Isthmus in the old days. 
Now even the dread of fever — the last nightmare to 
haunt its morasses — has been conjured away, thanks 
to sanitary measures that will serve as models to all 
the world. Under army supervision the death rate 
in the Canal Zone has been reduced to a lower per- 
centage than in any of the large cities of the United 
States. 

Panama City of to-day dates from the latter half of 
the seventeenth century. Old Panama, the city of 
the conquistador es, lay a few miles distant, and we 
shall visit its ruins presently. The newer city pos- 
sesses all the picturesque features, all the charm of an 
old Spanish town. Its streets are not straight and 
regular, as in most Latin- American cities, but wriggle 
and turn and twist out from and back to the long 
Avenida Central, the main street that traverses the 
city from end to end, containing the principal shops 
and crossing all the plazas. 

The houses are substantially built and washed with 
those pastel tones — rose, pale blue, water green, buff, 
and grey — of which the Spanish peoples are so fond. 

[24] 




■S -t T* "v«T\o 
The Cathedral, Panama 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

Verandas, as in Colon, overhang all the thorough- 
fares, and the indolent Panamans spend much of 
their time upon them or lounging about the numer- 
ous cafes and hostelries. 

There are several plazas. The old church of Santa 
Ana overlooks one; another is named for Bolivar, 
liberator of Spanish America and founder of its re- 
publics; and, appropriately enough, the government 
buildings, a little tawdry perhaps, and the post-office 
he near it. The third, and this is the largest and 
most important, is named for the cathedral that 
fronts upon it — a charming square planted with 
handsome palms and tropical gardens. The cathedral 
fagade, while not bearing critical analysis, has all the 
allure of the big Spanish churches, and the other re- 
ligious edifices of the city are picturesque and some- 
times rarely charming in colour. 

No matter what else you miss in Panama, do not 
neglect a walk upon the Bovedas, or city walls that 
skirt the gulf. These great fortifications, the most 
formidable, except those at Cartagena, that the Span- 
ish erected in their American possessions, are forty 
feet in height and no less than sixty feet in thickness. 
Their tops afford the favourite promenade for the 

[26] 



PANAMA 

Panamans, who, toward sunset, when the heat of 
the day has spent itself, saunter up and down its 
broad esplanade enjoying the cool breeze and watch- 
ing the sun slowly sink behind the hills. 

No matter how long you remain in Panama, you 
never grow quite accustomed to the points of the 
compass, for the sun rises out of the Pacific and sets 
behind the wooded mountains of the Isthmus, which, 
of course, is due to the fact that Panama lies east, or 
rather southeast, of Colon instead of west, as one 
would naturally suppose. 

From this sea-wall the view is beautiful. Off to 
the right lies Balboa, at the entrance to the canal, 
with the three fortified islands whose guns will com- 
mand the fairway. Farther from shore Taboga and 
Taboguilla, lovely and wooded, rise from the blue 
waters, the former a healthy spot supplied with the 
purest of water and used by the government as a 
sanitarium. Other islets lie dotted about, and to the 
south the gulf stretches off to the Pearl Islands, cov- 
eted treasure-lands, whose gems at one time rivalled 
those of Ceylon and supplied the Spanish crown with 
some of its rarest jewels. Shoreward lies the city, 
encircling its harbour, dominated by the cathedral 

[27] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

towers, whose spires are incrusted with pearl shells 
that, after the frequent rains, sparkle and glitter in 
the sunlight, serving as beacons to many a fisherman 
tossed in the troubled waters of the gulf. 

But to my mind the sea-wall promenade is at its 
best at night when the wondrous stars — the stars of 
the southern seas — twinkle and sparkle in the firma- 
ment. Then no one disturbs your reverie but the 
sentry rattling his musket as he moves in his stone 
look-out at an angle of the walls, or the sereno as he 
whistles to and is answered by the other night watch- 
men. The acacias nod their delicate leaves in 
the night breeze that plays soft and cool upon your 
cheek, and out over the flat salt marshes (for the 
waters of the sea only lick the walls at high 
tide) the moon rises, touching pool after pool with 
silver. 

To complete the evening, return to the plaza and 
watch the crowd that enjoys the music as the band 
plays: the women in black and the men in white; the 
natives (if it be Sunday) wearing the pollera, or na- 
tional costume, filling an interminable string of hired 
carriages that slowly meander up and down the 
Avenida. The stately palms framing Santa Ana's 

[28] 



PANAMA 

belfry cut their silhouettes against the sky of indigo ; 
the tread of human feet echoes on the glazed-tiled 

r 




Avenida Centred, Panama 

pavement; but all is toned and put in tune by the 
glamour of the southern night. 

It is with a sense of rude awakening that you 
enter the brilliantly lighted hall of the Hotel Tivoli 

[29] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

— so typically American in every detail, so strangely 
discordant, yet so comfortable and clean, in all this 
tropic atmosphere. 

An excursion to the ruins of Old Panama can easily 
be managed in one afternoon, and for it we preferred 
a carriage to a motor, so that we could enjoy it at our 
leisure. Our driver was an old Jamaican negro who 
spoke English with a cockney accent. He knew every 
plant of the tropics and pointed out as we went along 
the guava-trees and the poincianas, gorgeous with 
crimson flowers; the bread-fruits nodding their great, 
pointed leaves; and the trumpet-trees, whose vivid 
foliage, lined with silver, sparkled as the wind turned 
it over. He called our attention also to the whistling 
of the coral snake, saying that "if it stings you, it's 
a dirty business," and to an iguana, brilliant, green, 
that stood motionless by the roadside, strange relic of 
the Jurassic age — an esteemed delicacy of the natives, 
with meat as white and tender as that of squab 
chicken. Mango and rose apple, cocoa-nut palm and 
royal palm, engaged our attention turn by turn until 
we reached Las Sabafias. 

I do not mean to imply that the country is thickly 
wooded or jungle-like in character. On the contrary, 

[30] 



PANAMA 

the hills are rather bare and grass-grown like pasture 
lands, for all the tangle of tropic growth has been cut 
back in the interest of health. 

After the villas of Las Sabafias, where the well-to- 
do Panamans make their homes in summer, a few 




The Old Bells at Cruces 



native huts appear, thatched and faced with dried 
palm leaves or plaited like baskets with straw and 
cane. 

We now left the main road, turning aside at a prison 
where a huge alligator-skin, some eight feet long, was 
drying in the sun — product of a recent hunt. Soon 
we met the prisoners themselves making a new road 
to the beach. And here we came upon the ruins of 
Panama Viejo. 

[31] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

They have been cleared lately of their tangle of 
underbrush, and so are seen to better advantage than 
they formerly were when smothered in vines and 
creepers. First you cross a ruined bridge, then sub- 
stantial stone walls appear and foundations covering 
a considerable area, and finally the tall tower of the 
church of Saint Anastasius, rising close by the beach, 
overlooking the little harbour. Here lay the town 
that has caused such discussion among historians. 
The old Spanish chroniclers, with their customary 
enthusiasm, describe it as a great city of several 
thousand houses, with palaces and churches of suffi- 
cient splendour to make it resemble Venice ! Benzoni, 
an Italian who visited it at this same early epoch, 
resented this comparison, and says that, on the con- 
trary, it was nothing but a collection of rude mud 
huts. 

The truth lay somewhere between these two ex- 
tremes. The ruins that remain would certainly attest 
a well-built town of considerable importance, and it 
is probable that all about this substantial nucleus of 
stone clustered hundreds of flimsy constructions ex- 
tending into the surrounding savannahs. 

When a treasure-ship was despatched from Peru, 

[32] 



PANAMA 

an express was sent ahead to advise the people of 
Panama of its coming, and their governor, in his turn, 
notified the colonies along the Spanish Main. Upon 




.-. CT< ,.- TTo 



.sJiS&os"-^" 



Ruins of Old Panama 

its arrival the treasure was carried across the Isthmus 
by recuas, or donkey-trains, convoyed by strong forces 
of soldiers. But the English and French buccaneers, 
the Cimaroons, and the San Bias Indians with poi- 
soned arrows gave them many a bitter fight upon the 
way. Its destination was Nombre de Dios, that, 

[33] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

owing to its unhealthy situation, had but few per- 
manent inhabitants. Upon the arrival of these treas- 
ure-trains, however, it filled with a multitude of 
merchants from Panama and the colonies along the 
Caribbean, who bargained and bartered for weeks. 
The King's galleons, that had been waiting in the safe 
havens of Cartagena and Santa Marta, came over to 
load their precious cargoes and transport the King's 
Fifth to Spain. 

Thus upon this pebbly beach of Panama Viejo — a 
cove large enough for galleons but scarcely capable 
of accommodating half a dozen modern ships — all 
the wealth of the Incas, Atahualpa's ransom, the 
golden plates from the Temple of the Sun, the vast 
products of the silver mines of Potosi were landed 
to be transported across the Isthmus. 

The shore of the little bay still bears traces of its 
sea-wall and, I think, of a fortress such as one sees 
in towns of similar importance along the Mediter- 
ranean. 

As you turn your back upon the sea you look up 
toward the mountains, the hills from which Morgan 
looked down upon his prey after the misery he had 
suffered in crossing the Isthmus. And it was from 

[34] 



PANAMA 

their heights that, with flags flying, trumpets blow- 
ing, and drums beating a bravery, he descended 
to attack the doomed city. He left it some days 
later burned to the ground, its inhabitants tortured, 
robbed, or killed — so effectually wiped out that it has 
never been rebuilt. Two hundred beasts of burden 
laden with spoils and six hundred prisoners held 
for ransom went with him as he set out again to 
rejoin his boats hidden on the Chagres River near 
Cruces. 

We returned to Panama in the spell of the late 
afternoon. A marked change had taken place in the 
aspect of the road, especially after we passed Las 
Sabanas, for, instead of its mid-day loneliness, it was 
now dotted with buggies, carriages and motors of 
all descriptions being, toward evening, the favourite, 
in fact the only, drive from Panama. 

I shall not attempt any account of the wonderful 
canal work which, however, at the time of our visit 
was at its most interesting stage, the excavations at 
their deepest, the great cranes and derricks, steam 
shovels and puffing dirt-trains in full operation, and 
the giant locks alive with ant-like human beings 
crawling down below, hanging suspended on the 

[35] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

dizzy walls, or braving death upon the red, rust- 
proof gates as tall as sky-scrapers. 

Thanks to the courtesy of Mr. Bishop, secretary 
of the canal commission, who accompanied us in 
person, we made a rarely pleasant visit to its varied 
features, going about in a motor-car that runs on the 
tracks and therefore can follow anywhere that the 
dirt-trains go — that is, everywhere. 

When we felt that we had seen it all we drove one 
day over to Balboa, and at its long dock embarked 
for Peru. 



[36] 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 



DOWN THE WEST COAST 
TO PERU 

WHEN we boarded the steamer at Panama 
(or, as the new port is called, Balboa, 
and I like the name) we seemed to be 
headed for a new world. The moist and misty air, 
the soft hills fringed with tropical vegetation, the 
rich islands of the bay, Taboga and Taboguilla 
with their little neighbours, precipitous, yet thickly 
wooded down to the very water's edge, composed a 
picture so unlike the usual ports of embarkment in 
more northern climes that we settled ourselves in 
our chairs with a feeling of quiet expectancy, antici- 
pating a voyage on placid waters in the doldrums 
under the equator. Nor were we to be disappointed. 
As we slowly steamed down the gulf, the sun neared 
the horizon and its broad golden rays spread out great 
fingers behind the purple islands, making them ap- 
pear, as one of the young ladies naively expressed it, 

t 39 ] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

"like the old pictures of heaven." Long files of peli- 
cans lazily flapped their heavy wings as they slowly 
made their way homeward against the evening breeze. 

An hour later the faint forms of the Pearl Islands 
rose before us — San Jose to the southward; Pedro 
Gonzales to the north, and behind them the cloud- 
wreathed summit of Rey Island that screened from 
view Saint Michael's Bay, where Balboa strode into 
the surf to take possession of the Southern Sea in the 
name of the Spanish King. These islands lured us 
on like sirens, as they had many a mariner before us, 
by the glint of their precious gems, to fall into the 
hands of some pirate, some John Sharp or his like, 
lurking in an inlet awaiting the galleons, gold-laden, 
that bore the treasure of the Incas for trans-shipment 
to Spain. 

Following the same track that we were taking, 
Pizarro, nearly four hundred years ago, with his lit- 
tle company had set out upon his conquest of Peru. 
And that tall brig upon the horizon, 

"Her tiering canvas in sheeted silver spread," 

might she not well be his caravel bound for Gorgona 
or lonely Gallo or the verdant islands of the Gulf of 

[40] 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 

Guayaquil? The sun had now set; the clouds parted, 
and the moon, hitherto hidden, poured its pale radi- 
ance upon the calm Pacific. 

Next morning (how strange at sea !) I was awakened 
by the bleating of a lamb and by a lusty cock-crow. 
The Pacific Steam Navigation Company's steamers 
of the West Coast are a strange little world. Built 
for an ocean where storms are unknown, they com- 
bine certain comforts not to be found on much more 
pretentious boats. Their saloons and cabins are ex- 
ceptionally large and open directly upon the prome- 
nade-decks that stretch the entire length of the ship, 
there being, properly speaking, no steerage and no 
second class. The natives and others who cannot 
afford the first-class ticket travel in the "cubierta," 
as it is called, a deck at the stern roofed with canvas 
but otherwise open, where in picturesque confusion, 
surrounded by bags and bundles, they loll in ham- 
mocks or lie wrapped in shawls. 

Upon this deck the hen-coop faces, a big two- 
story affair, partly filled with ripening fruits — ba- 
nanas, oranges, and the like — and partly with chick- 
ens, ducks, and other forlorn-looking fowl fattening 
for the table. Between decks stand your beef and 

[41] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

mutton on the hoof, gazing mournfully up at you as 
you look down the hatchways. 

Upon this home-like boat, quiet and contented, 
with no unseemly hurry, you meander down the coast 
at ten knots. The air is soft as a caress, and for at 
least eight months of the year the sea as placid as a 
mountain lake, a glassy mirror reflecting an azure 
sky. 

For one who wishes to escape the rigours of a 
northern winter, for a lover of soft sunshine, of 
southern seas without the brisk trades of the Carib- 
bean, I can imagine no more delightful voyage than 
this West Coast cruise, quietly gliding southward, a 
cloudless sky overhead in the daytime, a marvellous 
starry heaven at night. Little by little the North 
Star drops toward the horizon; little by little the 
Southern Cross ascends in the firmament. 

It may be hot for the first day or two, but on the 
third day out you cross the equator and face the 
breeze that follows the antarctic current, Hum- 
boldt's Current, that freshens and cools what other- 
wise would be a hot and steamy coast. Occasionally 
the calm surface of the sea is ruffled, now by the spike- 
like fin of a shark or the blow and rounded back of 

[42] 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 

a grey whale; again by tortoise shining like great 
topazes set in opals or by silvery flying-fish skimming 
from wave to wave or schools of white-bellied man- 
tas that frolic along by the steamer's side. 

Three idle days pass by. 

At dawn upon the fourth I distinctly heard a 
locomotive whistle and then the clear call of a bugle. 
Looking out of the state-room window, I had my first 
glimpse of Peru. It was quite what I had been led to 
expect: a long, bleak shore of sand, desolate, treeless, 
dry. We were anchored before Paita, but the port 
was still silent and the little town apparently asleep, 
except for an officer taking his morning ride along the 
beach. By the time I came on deck a boat or two 
had put out from shore with the doctor and the com- 
pany's agent. Finally the captain of the port ar- 
rived, resplendent in his gold-laced uniform as he sat 
in the stern-sheets of his smart chaloupa, manned by 
four stalwart oarsmen in spotless white. 

I lost all interest in him, however, as soon as I made 
out the queer rafts and boats that were now paddling 
out toward us. Here, come to fife again, were the 
old woodcuts in Oviedo's "Historia." In the first 
edition of this old book, now rare and costly, pub- 

[43] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

lished in Seville only a few years after the Conquest, 
there are quaint pictures showing the manners and 
customs of the natives as the Spaniards first found 
them: their thatched huts, their cabins perched in 
the tree tops, their strange animals and queer fish, 
and their various primitive boats. Here in this har- 
bour of Paita these self-same craft were coming out 
to meet us — dugouts filled with fruit and manned by 
single Indians, balsas of cabbage-wood (a light timber 
common to Ecuador and Colombia) like those that 
brought the friendly caciques to greet Pizarro, and 
larger rafts, rigged with square sails, that ferried 
him and his little army, horses and all, from Puno 
to Tumbez, only a few miles distant in the Gulf of 
Guayaquil. 

But now another flotilla approached us; this time 
row-boats of more modern type, painted like those of 
Naples, blue and green, with the fleteros or boatmen, 
the sharks of the coast, who row you ashore for what- 
ever they can make, but are no better and no worse 
than their prototypes in Mediterranean waters. 

We landed, and upon the dock found Indian women 
in black mantas selling green paroquets and gaudy 
parrots and the strange tropical fruits with which we 

[44] 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 

were soon to grow so familiar. We walked to the 
Plaza, set out with palms and dominated by the 



SnH-' ; t?sS;l: ; i?i ^.>-;^^^fes% 




Native Boats, Paita 



towers of its church, a queer Hispano-Moorish affair 
in which a black-robed congregation was listening to 
low mass. 

We looked, too, into the Gran Hotel Pacinco, where, 
in its dining-room, we found quite the strangest ceil- 
ing decoration that we had ever seen. It was painted 
by some man of real ability,, not at all the same per- 

[45] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

son who had daubed the crude marines upon the walls, 
but a man who understood his art. Yet his subject 
was worthy of a neo-impressionist. In the corners 
parrots and gaudy butterflies disported themselves, 
while eggs and fruits lay about in salvers, but the 
dominant note, the raison d'etre, of the ceiling was an 
enormous lobster, some fifteen feet across, that spread 
its vermilion claws and nippers in all directions, em- 
bracing parrots and fruits, eggs and salvers, in its all- 
consuming clutches. 

Paita is really a very old settlement, dating from 
colonial days. Yet a walk among its streets discloses 
only the most ephemeral constructions, flimsy beyond 
belief — houses built of dry bamboo thinly covered 
with plaster and mud, so thinly covered, indeed, that 
one can look through the cracks and chinks into the 
rooms themselves. The whole fabric would crumble 
away in an instant at the first hint of rain. But rain 
comes to Paita, according to legend, only once in 
twenty years. Notwithstanding, Paita is the wettest 
place on the Peruvian coast. Thence southward for 
hundreds of miles to the distant coast of Chili, be- 
tween the Andes and the sea, it never rains, though 
clouds sometimes form, and at certain seasons a 

[46] 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 

sort of heavy mist, the camanchaca, hangs over the 
land for weeks at a time. 

We weighed anchor after luncheon, and all the af- 
ternoon skirted the sandy desert of Sechura, whose 
yellow dunes, backed by lavender mountains, termi- 
nate at times in rocky headlands shaped like ruined 
castles and spotted with guano. 

This was the desert that Pizarro and his men 
traversed after landing at Tumbez. On its outer 
confines they founded San Miguel di Piura, and 
after five months' halt decided to push on toward 
the mountains, leaving the coast and their ships 
behind them, braving the dangers of an unknown 
country swarming with savages. How they sur- 
mounted this mountain rampart; how, armour-clad 
and leading their foot-sore horses, they finally 
threaded its rocky defiles; how they supported the 
rigours of cold and exposure at the summit after the 
warm, tropical air of the coast; how, only two hun- 
dred strong, they seized the Inca at Cajamarca in 
face of his fifty thousand warriors, will ever be mat- 
ters of marvel. 

We reached Eten early next morning. A more 
desolate spot could scarcely be imagined. Sky, sea, 

[47] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

a long, sheer, sandy bluff, an iron mole, and that was 
all. What town there is must lie behind the dunes. 

From each of these coast ports, desolate as they 
may appear, railroads run inland, sometimes far, 
sometimes only for a short distance. From the looks 
of the coast one wonders where they run to, little 
suspecting, as we afterward found, the prolific val- 
leys that open behind, teeming with vegetation 
wherever water can be found. 

Harbours there are none from Guayaquil to Callao, 
the ships anchoring about a half-mile off shore, a fact 
that in these peaceful waters entails neither the dis- 
comforts nor inconveniences that it does on other 
coasts. Here at Eten we hoisted our new passengers 
aboard in a sort of car like those used in roller- 
coasters, four people at a time. Freight is trans- 
ferred in lighters which they call lanchas. Even 
before we had been "received" by the captain of the 
port, several of these could be seen approaching us. 

How can I describe them? They are about the 
size of a seagoing schooner. Five heavy beams laid 
across the bow form seats for ten men, whose brawny 
arms and well-developed deltoids and pectorals 
would do honour to trained athletes. Their type — 

[48] 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 

the broad, flat face, the high cheek-bones, the nar- 
row eyes, set atilt, and the drooping moustache — 
plainly show their descent from the Chimus, that 
strange Chinese race whose civilisation seems to have 
centred about Trujillo, somewhat farther down the 
coast. Clad only in jerseys and trousers, bare- 
headed or shaded by wide-rimmed straw hats, each 
lays hold of a gigantic sweep, five on a side. And 
how they row, wing and wing, throwing the whole 
weight of their mighty frames upon the oars, rising 
in their seats till standing — the only boatmen I ever 
saw who suggested the galley-slave of the Egyptians 
or the men who manned the Roman triremes! 

It is only a three hours' run from Eten to Pacas- 
mayo. On the way you catch glimpses of higher 
mountains, buttresses of the Coast Cordillera, and by 
the shore see little groups of fishing-huts clustered in 
the coves. We had thought the frail balsas of Paita 
the most daring of seagoing craft, but now we came 
upon others more daring still — the caballitos (little 
horses), tiny boats but six or eight feet long that, 
at a distance, look like the forward end of a gondola. 
They are made of two cylinders of straw lashed to- 
gether and diminishing toward the prow, where they 

[49] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

tilt sharply upward. The lone fisherman sits astride 
of them, his feet dangling in the water at either side, 
and thus he puts to sea, a sort of Triton bestriding 
his sea-horse. 

Pacasmayo lies in a wide-open roadstead enclosed 
by golden sand hills, behind which rise chains of lofty 
mountains, a long wall of blue, deceptive, apparently 
peaceful and soft in the distance, but jagged and 
precipitous at closer quarters and traversed only by 
mule-paths. Yet should I like to have crossed them, 
for beyond their lofty summits, hidden in a lovely 
valley, lies Cajamarca, alluded to above, the "City 
of Atahualpa's Ransom," the Inca town that played 
so important a part in the story of the Conquest. 

Another quiet night on shipboard sleeping with 
that dreamy contentedness that comes over one on 
a calm sea, and at dawn the following morning we 
were anchored off Salaverry, the most picturesque of 
the ports we had yet seen. The sun was just rising 
in a film of clouds. Behind the dunes that clasped 
the bases of the mountains in a firm embrace rose 
the ranges of the Andes, fold upon fold, first the foot- 
hills, purple-clad, then the fainter Coast Cordillera, 
and finally, blue and distant, the Black Cordillera. 

[50] 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 

But the Cordillera Real, the royal range of towering 
peaks, is not for the wayfarer by the coast. Once in 
a while on a clear, calm evening toward sunset a 
gleaming snow-capped peak may be descried like a 
cloud in the sky, but otherwise these mountain giants 
jealously guard their summits for the pilgrims to 
their shrine. Soon we were to become such pilgrims 
and see for ourselves the glories of their mighty 
heights. 

W T e landed at Salaverry and w T ere delighted with 
the broad strand, worthy of an Ostend or a Brighton, 
that stretches in a wide curve off toward Trujillo, 
founded by Pizarro and named by him for his birth- 
place in Estremadura, whose white domes and towers 
lay some miles distant like a mirage of the Orient 
among palms and verdant valleys. 

Salaverry itself is a low, one-storied affair whose 
broad, straight sandy streets with their wooden 
houses are strongly reminiscent of some of our 
Western frontier towns. Yet Spanish civilisation has 
put a picturesque impress upon it — upon its windows 
with their iron rejas; upon its broad verandas barred 
with screens and used as outdoor rooms; and upon 
the life of its streets, where women in black, half 

[51] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

hidden in sombre doorways, call to the aguador as he 
peddles his donkey-load of water from door to door, 
and half-naked street urchins vend chirimoyas and 
alligator pears at the street-corners. 




i". ,^-.P«r«..Tr.-—)^,t„; 



A Grated Veranda, Salaverry 



Upon the beach the fishermen mend their nets 
near the caballitos drying in the sun that stand erect 
against gaily painted fishing-smacks. It was a Sun- 
day morning, so the strand was dotted with bathers, 
diving in the surf or chasing each other in wild races 

[52] 




The Aguador Peddles His Donkey-Load of Water 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 

across the hard-packed sand, among them the chil- 
dren of the British vice-consul, the only foreigners 
upon the scene. 

Again we weighed anchor after lunch, and as we 
sailed southward the coast grew more and more 
majestic. Never a note of green, to be sure, but, by 
compensation, behind the fringe of golden sand that 
skirts the sapphire sea, range upon range of moun- 
tains, always varied, ever broken into a thousand 
cones and pinnacles and as changeable in hue as a 
chameleon, necked by fleecy cloud shadows through 
the whole gamut of greys, lavenders, and purples. 
At times the dunes would break as at Chimbote and 
inland valleys open green as gardens. Toward even- 
ing the level sun rays warm these ashen mountains, 
burnishing them like bronze, and their deep que- 
bradas and rocky gorges by contrast are plunged into 
indigo shadows of a strength and intensity quite be- 
yond belief. 

Occasionally islands whitened with guano lie upon 
the sea, and upon them nest myriads of birds, and 
along the water's edge flocks of glistening sea-lions 
bark and snarl and wriggle and fight or disport them- 
selves in the surf. Our captain took us quite close 
to one of these islets — so close, indeed, that with the 

[53] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

naked eye we could plainly see the innumerable birds, 
both shags and murre, that peopled its honeycombed 
pinnacles. Just as we passed he blew two mighty 
blasts upon the siren, and every seal threw itself 
headlong into the sea, while the birds in one enor- 
mous cloud that darkened the sun left their nests, 
flying far out to sea — a mist of golden dust rising 
from the island raised by the whir of their countless 
wings. 

For the first time in several days no land was in 
sight the following morning. But by ten o'clock the 
long, tawny hills of San Lorenzo Island appeared 
above the horizon, and we made Callao harbour 
within an hour. There lay a great variety of ship- 
ping, from the clean, white, English-built cruisers of 
the Peruvian navy and the smart "home-boats" of 
the Pacific Steam Navigation Company to old hulks 
anchored to the northward, whose only passengers 
or crew were the gulls and pelicans that settled in 
their rigging or perched along their decks. 

Our steamer was immediately surrounded by a 
swarm of small boats, each manned by a shouting 
crowd of fleteros, that made a gay and brilliant scene, 
painted in the brightest colours and covered with 
awnings not unlike those used upon the Italian lakes. 

[54] 



DOWN THE WEST COAST TO PERU 

We went ashore with friends in the company's 
motor-launch, got through the customs quickly, and 
soon were in the train bound for Lima, only eight 
miles distant. 

I rubbed my eyes as we sped along. Was I in Peru 
in early March or in California in September? It 
was surely the end of summer, for here were fields of 
ripened corn, there venders of luscious grapes. The 
cattle grazing in the parched fields, the Rimac roar- 
ing over its stony bed, the tawny shores of San Lo- 
renzo wreathed with fog like the Contra Costa hills, 
the files of eucalypti, even the whistle of the Ameri- 
can-built locomotive and the clang of its bell, re- 
called like magic the country that surrounds the 
Bay of San Francisco or hides in the depths of So- 
noma Valley. 

But there across the aisle sat a major in his Franco- 
Peruvian uniform, while in front of him a group of 
young subalterns in the same neat clothes conversed 
amiably to ladies in rather boisterous hats, and in 
the coach ahead, second class, the cholos and other 
mixed races that we could see proved beyond a 
doubt that we were in Peru. 

[55] 



LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 



LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 

I IMA is a flat city whose straight, wide streets are 
as regular in plan as those of any metropolis 
— » of the New World. Pizarro is said to have 
laid it out, and if he did so he used a T-square and no 
imagination, merely leaving one empty block in the 
centre for a Plaza de Armas. Like all cities built 
upon this checker-board system, it lacks both the pic- 
turesqueness and charm of the mediaeval town and 
the dignity and stateliness of the modern city whose 
converging streets meet to frame views of important 
monuments. 

Despite this drawback, however, Lima has a 
physiognomy all its own. Throughout the colonial 
period it was the capital of the Spanish-American 
colonies, the residence of the viceroy and of the 
nobility. Hence it contains, more than any other 
South American city, notable examples of Hispanic 
architecture little suspected by the average tourist. 

[59] * 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

The streets, too, have distinct individuality, im- 
parted to a great extent by the balcones, adaptations 
of the Oriental moucharaby, or mirador, often elab- 
orately carved, that project from the upper story of 
almost every house, far out over the sidewalks, some- 
times occurring uninterruptedly for blocks at a time. 
They are most practical, allowing the air to pass 
freely to the rooms within, yet screening the house 
walls from the direct rays of the sun. The people, 
especially the women, live upon them, flitting be- 
hind their long rows of windows as they pass from 
room to room or leaning over the rail to watch the 
life in the streets below. The shops, too, are peculiar, 
being without fronts — wide open during the daytime 
and closed by long series of folding wooden doors at 
night. 

Much interest is also imparted to these streets by 
the stately palaces, mostly dating from the viceregal 
period, that are encountered in all the principal thor- 
oughfares. They present a rather forbidding aspect, 
with their great walls pierced only by a few barred 
windows and by their monumental porte-cocheres. 
But look through one of these vast doorways, and all 
is gaiety within. In an instant you are transported 

[60] 



LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 

to Spain and the sunlit courts of Andalusia. Here 
the same patios, washed with pale pastel tones and 
paved with tiles or coloured marbles, bask in the 







V-.V>;..TT. lit 



" Balcones," Lima 



sunlight, decked with palms and oleanders screened 
behind iron gratings of intricate and artistic work- 
manship. Through pavilions at the rear you catch 
glimpses of other gardens beyond. The whole scheme, 
cool, airy, framing the peep of blue sky overhead, 

[61] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

seems singularly well adapted to this land of soft sun- 
shine. 

The Plaza is a handsome square, well paved, 
neatly kept, and adorned with beautiful tropical gar- 
dens set with flowers and stately palms, and ornate 
lamp-posts supporting arches of lights for festivals. 
It is surrounded on two sides by portales, or arcades, 
lined with shops. The third side is occupied by the 
palace and the fourth by the cathedral. 

This last is not as interesting as some of the other 
great Peruvian churches. It was apparently made 
over in the last century, when a wave of classic re- 
vival swept away many of the picturesque plater- 
esque constructions of the Latin-American churches 
and substituted cold Roman columns and arches for 
the elaborate pediments and richly carved surfaces 
of the Churrigueresque artists. So now the cathedral 
lacks much of that interest that one expects to find 
in a building of its age. The interior, too, suffers at 
first sight from the same cause, yet upon closer in- 
vestigation the choir and chapels yield notable works 
of art. There are, for example, the massive silver high 
altar and the rarely beautiful silleria, rows of richly 
carved stalls ornamented with good statues of saints 

[62] 




Lima Cathedral from the Bodegones 



LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 

and apostles enshrined in ornate canopies or framed 
in elaborate panelling — all done in cedar wood after 
the best Hispanic traditions. The Chapel of the 
Purissima, too, is a fine piece of plateresque not yet 
debased by the barocco, and we discovered in the 
sacristy a delightful little Moorish fountain of ala- 
baster, the glint of whose tiles in the penumbra and 
the splash of whose water in the silence recalled to 
us some inner court of the Alhambra. 

In the Chapel of the Virgen Antigua, under the 
benign eyes of a placid Virgin and Child sent over 
from Spain by Charles V, a modest white casket with 
open glass sides contains the remains of that won- 
derful ruffian, that intrepid conquistador, Francisco 
Pizarro. As I looked at his dried bones and mummi- 
fied flesh exposed thus publicly to the gaze of the 
curious, lying upon, but in no way shrouded by, a 
bed of purple velvet, his entrails in a bottle at his 
feet, I wondered if it was with design that his re- 
mains are so displayed. Is it mere chance that this 
poor tomb is all that marks his final resting-place? 
Is it by mere neglect that no monument to him (at 
least to my knowledge) exists in all Peru? 

During the last stormy days of his life he occupied 

[63] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

the palace that he built across the Plaza. This vast, 
rambling pile is worthy of a visit, not merely because 
it is the actual residence of the President, the White 
House of Peru, but because of its historic associations. 
A big doorway, where a company of soldiers al- 
ways mounts guard, admits to an outer court, vast 
in scale, across which you reach a stairway that leads 
to a broad upper corridor, severely chaste, white and 
fresh, and open to the sky throughout its entire 
length. A series of apartments leads off on either 
hand, and sentinels challenge you at each door, for 
revolutions are frequent. But under the guidance of 
the President's chief aide-de-camp, a colonel of dis- 
tinction and courtly manners, we visited in turn the 
various reception-rooms, with their ornately gilded 
furniture of the viceregal period, and saw the vice- 
roy's throne that still, standing under its baldaquin 
but shorn of its imperial ornaments, does duty for 
the President. We admired, too, the proportions and 
acoustics of the long banquet-hall, a bit shabby, per- 
haps, but hemmed in between two of the lovely trop- 
ical gardens that are incorporated within the palace 
walls, some of their ancient fig-trees, we were told, 
dating from the days of Pizarro. 

[64] 






iW 



^ -Jr»'*<< 



Aj^ 



<» P to., 



•-."is?*** -r#. 



' .-o 















/n <Ae President's Garden 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

The apartments that he occupied open upon an 
inner corridor, long and narrow, down which the old 
lion at bay fought Rada's men, single-handed, to- 
ward the street and safety. At the foot of its last 
step you are shown a small white stone that is said 
to mark the spot where he fell, wounded to the death, 
and where, dipping his finger in a pool of his own 
blood, he traced a cross upon the ground, expiring 
as he kissed it. 

I had the rare good fortune, while in Lima, to pro- 
cure as my cicerone a certain police commissioner 
(that is the best translation I can make of his title) 
who knew every corner of the capital and apparently 
every one in it. Whether in the halls of the Presi- 
dent's palace, or the grim corridors of the peniten- 
tiary, or the dark aisles of the churches, he seemed 
equally at home, and every one treated him as a 
friend. His kindness was of great value to me, for, 
strange as it may seem, there exists no guide-book 
to Lima, and it is difficult to ferret out the points 
of interest. 

With him I visited the monasteries, and was cer- 
tainly surprised by what I found in them. Nothing 
that I had heard, nothing that I had read, had pre- 

[66] 



LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 

pared me for what I saw, for they have been strangely 
neglected by travellers. Yet to my mind they are 
among the chief features of the city — of interest both 
because of their vast extent as well as for the numer- 
ous art treasures that they contain. 

The finest belongs to the Franciscans and faces 
upon one of the prettiest little squares of the city, 
the Plaza of San Francisco. To visit it you enter a 
sort of vestibule whose lower walls are completely 
covered with beautiful Mudejar tiles in which little 
amorini alternate curiously with grim deaths' heads. 
Borders of deep lapis blue frame the panels and com- 
pletely surround the great doorway that occupies one 
end of the hall. In answer to a knock the little 
wicket opens, a few words are exchanged, the heavy 
door swings, a brown friar steps back to let you pass, 
and you enter another world — a world of seclusion 
and quiet, of cloister courts with brown monks mov- 
ing silently about or digging in the flower-beds, of 
ancient pictures depicting the life of good Saint Fran- 
cis looking down from their golden frames upon sun- 
lit gardens filled with the bright bloom of the tropics. 

It would be quite impossible to describe the laby- 
rinths of this convent's courts, the varied features of 

[07] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

its trinity of churches and its thirteen chapels with 
their carved coros and gilded altars. But its chief 
interest lies in the beautiful azulejos, or glazed tiles, 
that completely cover the lower walls and pillars of its 
cloisters. These date mostly from the early years of 
the seventeenth century and are of great variety. 
Some are patterned with the rich designs of the high 
Renaissance; others with figures of brown-cowled 
monks; others again with heraldic monsters or with 
those intricate arabesques that the Moors introduced 
into Spain. Moorish, too, is the beautiful flattened 
dome that covers the main stairway, a great half- 
orange of cedar wood, unfortunately now falling to 
decay, but still retaining enough of its original inlay 
of ebony and bone to recall its pristine glory. 

The Dominicans possess an equally beautiful mon- 
astery though not as extensive a one. It is the oldest 
in Lima, and, like San Francisco, is richly adorned 
with tiles that date from the second decade of the 
seventeenth century, many of them evidently de- 
signed expressly for the convent, depicting scenes in 
the history of the Dominican order. 

Through the upper loggia of one of the inner courts, 
whose rose-coloured walls act as a foil to a pale-green 

[68] 







if- i 







'' ^-^K^.TX, 



Cloister of San Francisco, Lima 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

fountain in the centre, you reach the library, a quiet 
room divided by arches resting upon slender columns. 
On the morning of my visit a painter was graining the 
shafts of these columns to imitate marble. Several 
brothers in white stood watching him, their shaven 
heads and intellectual faces (for these Dominicans 
are of a studious stamp) making an attractive pic- 
ture for some Vibert or Zamacois against the golden 
background of parchment-covered books lit by the 
sunlight that filtered through the leaded windows. 
There are other monasteries of lesser note, repeti- 
tions on a smaller scale of these great ones. 

Of Lima's churches, San Pedro makes the richest 
effect. It is the fashionable church of the city, and 
its dark aisles, with their deep-toned paintings set in 
elaborate gilded frames, their polychrome saints and 
martyrs looking out from niches charged with carv- 
ings that wake the shadows with the glow of their 
golden ornaments, their retablos toned with the 
smoke of incense and the dust of years, form a fine 
background indeed for the beautiful women that fre- 
quent it — women whose pallid faces gleam like ivory 
from beneath the lacy folds of the mantilla or the 
sombre pleats of the heavy manta. 

[70] 




Patio of the Torre Tagle Palace, Lima 



LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 

The palace of the Torre Tagles without doubt 
takes precedence over all the secular buildings of the 
city. 

Its superb balcones, the finest in the city, would 
alone arrest your attention, or its doorway, the best 
example of the Churrigueresque style that I saw in 
Peru. You may or you may not like this form of 
architecture, with its bizarre proportions, its broken 
pediments, its general lack of organism, but the mere 
bulk of this entrance, the grandeur of its scale and ab- 
sence of finicky detail will prepare you for the splen- 
did court-yard within. This great patio is reached 
through a deep vestibule where, after the fashion of 
Spanish palaces, steps are arranged for mounting and 
dismounting from horses. 

The court itself is shaded by a broad projecting 
balcony of cedar wood left without paint or varnish, 
its columns, arches, and balustrades richly carved, 
and its supporting corbels, elaborate and intricate in 
detail, ornamented with heads of animals and men 
that, though Hispanic in design, are evidently the 
handicraft of highly skilled Indian workmen. 

A broad staircase, whose glazed tiles imitate a stair- 
rail upon the one hand, while its mahogany stair-rail 

[71] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

imitates these same tiles upon the other, leads to the 
upper balcony where the main apartments open. 
These are spacious and handsome and still contain 
much of their antique furniture of the viceregal 
period, among other things two superb wardrobes, 
royal objects of massive design completely encrusted 
with mother-of-pearl, silver, and tortoise-shell, the 
viceroy of Mexico's wedding gift to an ancestor of 
the family. Handsome portraits of gentlemen in 
wigs and the elaborately embroidered coats and 
waistcoats of the eighteenth century, and of ladies 
in the voluminous skirts and powdered hair of the 
same period, complete a picture of aristocratic life 
under the Spanish regime. 

The Torre Tagles, who counted among their mem- 
bers two viceroys and the first President of Peru, 
were a family of great importance, as many things 
about the palace testify. By royal grant, a pair of 
cannon, their noses planted in the ground at either 
side of the vestibule, gave right of asylum to any one 
who passed between them. In one corner of the patio 
a heraldic lion carved in wood supports a post from 
which hung the scales that weighed the gold and 
silver for the King's troops, the head of this family 

[72] 



LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 

having been for centuries paymaster of the army and 
navy. The great collection of pictures that they 
owned, once the most notable in Peru, is now bein°- 
dispersed, and their state coach, a gilded caleche 
worthy of the royal stables f" 
of Madrid, has been be- 
queathed to the National 
Museum, where it now 
forms the central object in 
the colonial collection. 

This National Museum, 
with the National Li- 
brary, and San Marcos 
University founded in 
1551, the oldest in the 
New World, form the 
three important institu- 
tions of learning in the 
capital. 

The museum's well-ordered cases, arranged by an 
enthusiastic German archaeologist, afford an excellent 
opportunity to study the civilisation of the Incas, 
containing, as they do, rare picture cloths from Tia- 
huanaco, with their strange conventionalised figures 

[73] 




Weighing-Post in the Torre Tagle 
Palace 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

of animals and men; quaintly fashioned huacos 
(funeral urns) that, like the Greek and Etruscan 
vases, give us the best documents we have of the 
manners and customs of the times; and row upon 
row of those strange, seated mummies whose knees 
touch their chins and whose faces are covered with 
masks of gold, silver, or vicuna cloth, according to 
their social standing. 

The National Library is again of importance. I 
say again, for during the Chilian invasion it was ruth- 
lessly looted and its priceless treasures carried off by 
a pack of vandals. Now, however, through the un- 
remitting efforts of Don Riccardo Palma, one of 
the most brilliant literary lights of Latin America, 
whose "Recuerdos de Lima" forms the classic col- 
lection of the city's tales and legends, it has again 
attained to a certain degree of its former impor- 
tance. 

San Marcos University looks much as it did in 
colonial days, and its sunny cloisters, with their white 
arcades, still echo the footsteps and voices of students 
preparing for the liberal professions. 

It is in one of the populous quarters of the city — 
one of the districts where you may still see some of 

[74] 



LIMA, CITY OF THE KINGS 

the curious street types of Lima: the aguador vending 
his water, or the lechera peddling her milk, mounted 
high upon her pillion, a Panama hat upon her head, 
her huge cans, bound in calf-skin sacks, dangling at 
either side of her ambling pony. Here, too, or over 
in the Malambra quarter, near where the favourite 
of the viceroy Amat dwelt in seclusion in the Casa 
Perricholi, you will find the vendors of chicha, the 
national drink, women who smoke cigars and carry 
bamboo canes, and the panaderos who cover their 
bread-baskets with bright-red parasols. And at any 
time, in any street, you may meet the capeador, 
perhaps the most characteristic of all the Lima types, 
mounted upon his pacing pony of Arab stock, whose 
hair saddle-cloths, silver-mounted bridle, and hous- 
ings over the tail will recall the trappings of the 
mediaeval knights. 

The business streets of the city are animated; the 
better shops full of attractive imported articles, es- 
pecially wearing apparel, for the women are smart 
and well dressed, devoting much of their time and 
attention — too much, perhaps — to their clothes. If 
you want to see a group of them, go in the winter 
season to the race-course, or in the bathing season, 

[75] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

December to April, upon a Sunday morning, to La 
Punta, a little resort reached by trolley. 

And if you want to see more of them and in more 
attractive surroundings, go some Sunday evening to 
Barranco, and especially to Chorrillos, where a broad 
promenade skirts the sea. The scene in many ways 
would remind you of some lesser resort on the Riviera 
— the broad terrace with its balustrades and seats, 
the music in the band-stand, the palm gardens, the 
villas new and bright overlooking the terrace, and the 
sea among whose lazy rollers far below lies the yacht 
club with its phantom boats. 

With a bit of energy, with the impetus of a few 
enthusiastic citizens, Lima could be made most at- 
tractive as a winter resort. When the Canal is opened, 
I dare say it will become one, especially when some 
hotel not yet in existence, but soon to be, I hear, 
shall have been constructed, set in wide gardens. 



[76] 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 



TO THE ROOF OF THE WORLD 

AND then there is the Oroya Railway. 

/ \ What city in the world can boast such an 
-*- ^ attraction at its very doors? Where else can 
you, in the short space of a few hours, ascend from 
the coast, from palms and mango groves, bananas 
and tropical gardens, to the snow and ice of eternal 
winter, to heights above the utmost summit of Mont 
Blanc? 

All this is possible through the pluck, ingenuity, 
and indomitable perseverance of a certain American 
promoter, a picturesque figure of the sixties, Henry 
Meiggs. He it was who conceived this gigantic 
scheme to scale the dizzy steeps of the Andes, and he 
it was who carried to execution this first railroad, 
and the only one that crosses these icy summits at 

[79] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

such an elevation, to this day the "highest railway 
in the world." No matter what else you may see in 
this mundane sphere of ours, you will never forget 
the day you climbed the Oroya Railway. 

We made the trip under exceptionally favourable 
auspices. A private car, most comfortable in all its 
appointments, was put at our disposal, and in it we 
lived, with two excellent servants to care for us. 

Instead of leaving Lima by the early morning 
train, as is usually done, our car was attached to the 
afternoon passenger and left at Chosica for the night, 
a station about twenty-five miles distant and a lit- 
tle less than three thousand feet above the sea, used 
as a resort, a sort of cure d'air, by the Limanians. 
After dinner we walked about its streets, and, in the 
semi-darkness of the tropic night, enjoyed its villas 
set in palm gardens, their windows and doors wide 
open and the occupants sitting upon verandas or 
chatting in the brightly lighted drawing-rooms. 

As I awoke in the early morning I could hear our 
engine breathlessly climbing from height to height, 
puffing like a winded horse, and could see in the grey, 
dim dawn the long fingers of banana-trees swaying in 
the breeze and the clustered palms rustling their dry 

[80] 




On the Oroya Railway 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 

leaves. Dark-blue slaty kills skut us in, and at tke 
bottom of tke gorge tke Rimac stormed along, a 
roaring torrent. 

As it grew ligkter we reacked tke first switckback, 
tke only device used on tkis wonderful road, standard 
gauge, to overcome tke difficulties of climbing tke 
dizzy keigkts. Here, too, we came upon tke first 
andenes, tkose Inca terraces still in use, irrigated witk 
painstaking toil by canals tkat deflect tke waters of 
tke river along tke faces of tke cliffs. Below us lay 
tke narrow river valley, divided, like a large green 
relief map, into states and territories by wriggly 
stone walls, and dotted kere and tkere witk cattle, 
impossibly small. 

Tke vegetation was ckanging. Along tke track 
grew strange cacti wkose long green fingers stood 
erect and serried as organ pipes. Loquats and figs 
and masses of wild keliotrope were still to be seen, 
tkougk we kad passed tke six-tkousand-foot level. 

We slowed down at Matucana wkile tke engine 
took a drink, and we kad a glimpse of its clean little 
kotel and gaily painted kouses opposite tke station. 
Two Franciscan friars and a group of serranos, moun- 
taineers, in ponchos, or brigkt skirts, disappeared 

[81] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

within the little pink church for early mass. Early 
mass! And we had already climbed more than a 
mile in altitude that morning. 

But we were only beginning our ascent. Our en- 
gine, having caught its breath and greased its joints, 
started again to puff and snort and haul us from 
switchback to switchback. In the next ten miles we 
attained the ten-thousand-foot level, and as I looked 
on the one hand at the dullish purple cliffs with their 
varied stratifications and at the deep-red ones op- 
posite, I thought of the Colorado Midlands and of 
the splendours of Marshall Pass, and of the time, 
years ago, when the crossing of that divide, at the 
same altitude that we now were, constituted an ac- 
complishment of considerable moment. 

From our observation platform at the rear of the 
train we looked down into giddy abysses where the 
Rimac now raced in a succession of cascades, while 
above us towered great crags covered with tunas 
and cacti. Every now and then a snow-peak would 
appear, touching the heavens. The sun had burst 
forth, dispelling the morning vapours. We penetrated 
into a region of glistening granite and porphyry. 
The Rimac boiled through a chasm and disappeared 

[82] 




The Narrow River Valley Like a Relief Map 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 

into a cave. Between two tunnels we breathlessly 
crossed the Infiernillo Bridge — well named in this 
chaos of Hades. 

The air became decidedly cooler, not to say cold, 
after the soft warmth of the coast, and the mountain 
people that we saw, wrapped in shawls and woollens, 
showed this change. At the next station we spied 
the first llamas, those strange Peruvian beasts of 
burden, with liquid, scornful eyes and ears tipped 
with red worsteds, silently munching by the track. 
In an instant they were gone as we sped along up- 
ward. What walls to climb, what cliffs! Switchback 
and loop, tunnel and bridge, higher and ever higher 
we go! In the next two miles we climbed five hun- 
dred feet; after that three thousand more in but fif- 
teen miles. 

We had now ascended to a bleak and stony wilder- 
ness. The mighty Rimac had dwindled to a tiny 
stream, a thread of water but a few feet wide, boil- 
ing over the rocks. Vegetation there was none. Soft, 
fleecy clouds gathered again about us, and here, 
nearly fourteen thousand feet above the sea, Pedro 
served us our lunch. It was no common experience, I 
assure you, to partake of so delicate a repast almost 

[83] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

three miles above the sea : alligator pears at the begin- 
ning, fresh-picked that morning at Chosica, chirimo- 
yas and wonderful Italian grapes from lea at the end, 
and in between fresh green corn, though it was the 
month of March! 

And what a panorama from the window before 
which the table was spread! Oh, the grandeur and 
the beauty of colour of this high Cordillera, its dark 
greys spotted by golden greens, the gamuts of reds 
and ochres and chromes of the great coppery moun- 
tains that shut us in! The last two hundred feet 
of altitude was apparently the steepest grade — the 
greatest strain of all — for our engine snorted con- 
tinuously and stopped to catch its breath and get 
up steam again to fight this extraordinary altitude. 
Again we looked into bottomless pits; again we 
passed through tunnel after tunnel, and at last 
emerged upon the verge of Lake Ticlio — a pale-green 
mirror of murky water, barren as a landscape on 
the moon. Beyond it rose bald snow-peaks, gaunt 
and desolate. Breathless, we had reached the sum- 
mit of the pass up above the clouds, again in the 
sunshine. 

At Ticlio our car was detached and we were 

[84] 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 

switched off on the Morococha branch, to begin to 
climb once more. Not for long, however; only to 
Anticona, a desolate spot without a house in sight, 
but the highest point ever yet attained by any rail- 
road, fifteen thousand eight hundred and sixty-five 
feet above the sea-level. 

The frozen peaks of the Black Cordillera, seamed 
with greenish glaciers and deep crevasses, encom- 
passed the lakes of Anticona, one green, one purple, 
below which other lakes in the clouds at times ap- 
peared, then hid again in flying vapours. We skirted 
each of these lakes in turn, one after the other, and, 
as we crossed the last of them upon a narrow cause- 
way, beheld visions of others still, lower, matchless 
in colour, about which the ground was scratched and 
rasped by greedy human hands digging in the copper 
mines of Morococha. 

Morococha lies in a valley between the last two 
lakes, its yellow-ochre houses scarcely visible, so well 
do they harmonise with their dark surroundings. We 
were welcomed at the station by two American en- 
gineers — strange to find at this extraordinary alti- 
tude. While we were talking to them a loud clap of 
thunder suddenly broke the stillness, the clouds 

[85] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

gathered thickly, and one of those swift Andean 
thunder-storms, so common at these heights, was un- 
chained about us. What deluges! what a roaring of 
the elements! For our return journey to Ticlio a 
transformation had taken place. The snow was fall- 
ing heavily, the green and purple lakes had now be- 
come leaden and angry-looking, and the peaks and 
their glaciers were enveloped alike in a thick white 
mantle, only a crag or two emerging here and there, 
like the black tippets upon an ermine cloak. 

In the chaos of snorting engine and warring ele- 
ments, we were attached at Ticlio to a lone loco- 
motive and proceeded as a special through the long 
Galera tunnel that pierces an abutment of the Monte 
Meiggs (named for the builder of the road), the high- 
est point on the main line. It was about four o'clock 
as we sped down the eastern slopes to the great cen- 
tral plateau of Peru, through a perfect avenue of 
giant mountains, the snow falling unceasingly until 
it changed to rain, and green valleys began to suc- 
ceed the snow-fields. At six o'clock we pulled into 
Oroya for the night. 



[86] 



II 

XAUXA AND HUANCAYO 

OROYA proved, by the morning light, to be 
but a desolate little town set in a valley 
walled about by high grey mountains and 
drained by a saffron-tinted river that rushed madly 
toward the south. The natives peddling vegetables 
in the street or huddled about the station, the llama- 
trains in the corrals, the quaint music of a primitive 
harp that floated in the air gave us a foretaste of 
what we were now setting out to see: the market at 
Huancayo. 

The sun did not top the great bald mountains until 
nine o'clock, and at ten we drew out of the station en 
route for Xauxa. The track followed the course of 
the Mantaro River, descending, as it did so, to a 
succession of lower valleys, one after another, that 
grew richer and more productive as we sped along. 
Here, under this tropical sun, ten to eleven thou- 
sand feet seems to be about the right altitude. This 

[87] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

the Incas realised, for the principal seats of their 
civilisation lay in these inland valleys hemmed in by 
the mighty Cordillera. 

Now, at the end of the rainy season (their March 
corresponds to our September), all was lovely and 
green. Fields of alfalfa succeeded to barley patches, 
the rocky ledges glowed with yellow marguerites, and 
spans of big white oxen dragged primitive wooden 
ploughs through the earth, softened by rains. In 
more arid spots a lonely shepherdess would sit with 
her dog watching her grazing herd. Cattle and 
sheep raising is the chief industry of the country, 
for the hay and grass continually resows itself. 

At the end of the valley lay Llocllapampa, an old 
Quichua town, set in olive-groves and fields of wild 
mustard. Beyond it we ran alongside of a cactus- 
bordered road that from time to time crossed tor- 
rents pouring down from the mountains to swell the 
mighty Amazon. This was the sort of highway that 
Pizarro followed when he marched upon Cuzco from 
Caxamarca, and these were the very valleys through 
which he passed, whose simple natives stood amazed 
at his men of steel bestriding great animals beside 
which their llamas looked small and tame indeed. 

[88] 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 



At one point in our ride some sheep and cattle 
were grazing along the track and two mounted 






Mm 



\i/j .. _' v.www / •: • ■ • 'Li. 



\\ f ^' ,/j -^r- -*r*->-~>£x&SJ ■ •' ' '.Jess 



Jif 




Entrance to a Corral, Oroya 

herdsmen in vivid ponchos came to round them up, 
galloping across a frail bridge that rocked and swayed 
under the weight of their horses, being slung across 

[89] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

the chasm only by means of willow withes like those 
the Incas used to twist. 

But the Spanish have definitely imposed their im- 
print on the land. The pink-roofed villages that hug 
the hillsides are true bits of Spain; the cemeteries, 
walled about and towered at the corners, are Hispanic 
in character, and the haciendas are all of the Span- 
ish type. 

Now the country grew wild and treeless again, and 
we passed through a gorge mined out by water like the 
Grand Canyon of the Colorado. And then, in a veri- 
table oasis of eucalyptus groves, lying in the broad 
valley whose richness was so often mentioned by the 
ancient chroniclers, we came upon Xauxa sunning its 
pink-tiled roofs in the afternoon light. 

The station lies just beyond the town, and is walled 
about and enclosed by gates like most of the principal 
depots along the Peruvian railways. So it was with 
pleasant anticipation that we looked forward to a 
peaceful night in our comfortable car out under the 
stars in the country. 

Dazzling white houses, whose broad eaves stretch 
out to shade the narrow sidewalks, border the streets 
that lead to the plaza — a vast square out of all pro- 

[90] 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 

portion to the low buildings that surround it and to 
the market uses to which it is put. It was none the 
less picturesque with its wriggling lines of vendors 




The Plaza, Xauxa 



squatting in the shade of their primitive para- 
sols and its churches and public buildings ranged 
about it. 

The most important church is a large edifice of no 
special architectural interest, being a sort of echo of 
the Cathedral of Lima. But its interior has escaped 
restoration and makes a dignified appearance with 
its white walls and single barrel-vault that frame a 

[91] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

superb reredos occupying the entire east end of the 
church — one of those amazing structures, gilded, 
painted, and ornamented with statues, pictures, col- 
umns, and cornices that, in this case, are held well 
within bounds, restrained, and fretted by the rich 
but flat detail of the plateresque rather than the wan- 
ton exuberance of the baroque. What a treasure- 
trove for some museum, this fine piece of Spanish art 
hidden in the mountains of Peru! 

With some difficulty we found a crazy old carriage 
to drive us out to call upon a charming Spanish fam- 
ily who possess a villa on the banks of a lake some 
distance down the valley. The rough road led off 
through lanes of century plants into the open coun- 
try. 

Now we could see the hills behind the town crowned 
with Inca ruins — sole remnants of the very consider- 
able Indian town that once played so conspicuous a 
part in the Wars of the Conquest and the civil wars 
that followed. Here, along the Mantaro, the Inca 
warriors, relying upon the width of the river as a 
barrier, made their first determined stand against 
Pizarro during his march upon Cuzco. But the im- 
petuosity of the Spanish riders, whose horses plunged 

[92] 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 

into the stream, swimming and wading to the oppo- 
site bank, soon put them to rout and sent them flee- 
ing toward the mountains. 

Here, too, at Xauxa, Pizarro spent many anxious 
days awaiting news of De Soto, sent ahead to recon- 
noitre; and, further to add to his troubles, his crea- 
ture, the young Inca Toparca, whom he had set upon 
the throne of Atahualpa, died, a victim, it was sup- 
posed, of poison. 

The ride to the lake gave us a pretty glimpse of 
this valley of Xauxa with its sheep grazing in the 
meadows, its long files of eucalypti and clusters of 
tincurals, and its flights of beautiful birds, eddying 
and dipping and soaring aloft in brilliant yellow 
clouds — principally hilgueros and trigueros — that, 
when they alighted in the cactus-hedges, sang as 
sweetly as canaries. 

The villa that we visited was set upon the very 
waters of the lake, the long reeds brushing the ve- 
randa as they bowed in the breeze. The air was 
balmy, like a lovely day in spring — soft, yet with a de- 
licious tang in it. A little removed from the shore, 
a group of flamingoes stood, pink and rosy, one- 
legged in the water. The children were presented 

[93] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 



for our inspection; one of the senoritas "touched" 
the piano; we were offered refreshments, and then 
before sunset started back for the town. 

At dawn next morn- 
ing I felt a bump and 
then realised that we 
were moving. Grey 
silhouettes of trees and 
fainter silhouettes of 
mountains flitted past 
the window. 

We had been anxious 
to see the great market 
at Huancayo, and, as 
there is no train on Sun- 
day morning, a special 
engine had been sent up 
for our car, so that we 
pulled in to the station 
before seven o'clock. 
In spite of the early hour all was in a bustle, and 
when we walked into the main plaza, what a sight 
met our eyes ! This plaza, surrounded by low houses, 
forms a part, as it were, of a main street broad enough 

[94] 




A Native Family, Huancayo 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 

for a metropolitan boulevard, yet it and the square 
were a compact, seething mass of humanity and 
beasts. They told us that there were between ten 




Corner of the Indian Market, Huancayo 

and twelve thousand Indians at that morning's 
market, and I fully believe it. 

In the great square itself the men stood about for 
the most part, bartering and talking, arrayed in 
gaudy ponchos and wide-rimmed hats. The women 
were sitting in circular groups upon the ground, eat- 
ing their morning meal of steaming food, dipping it 

[95] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

out of earthen vessels with the spoons whose handles 
pin their shawls at the shoulder like the Roman 
agrafes, or they squatted in long lines from end to 
end of the plaza, forming, with their bright shawls, 
and their vivid wares wrapped in woven bags and 
blankets, a huge crazy quilt covering every foot of 
available space. 

It was a bewildering scene indeed, this multitude 
of bright colours, relieved against the low houses in 
whose tiendas men and women sat drinking those 
tiny glasses filled apparently with water, but in real- 
ity with the fiery alcohol, almost pure, distilled on 
the sugar plantations along the coast. At one end 
stood a great mud-coloured ruin — of a church, I 
think, with sightless windows and an open portal — 
around whose base great herds of llamas and donkeys 
stood gathered in picturesque confusion. Down the 
street came water-carriers, staggering along among 
vendors of coca and bright aniline dyes that would 
delight a post-impressionist's heart, while along the 
curbs sat the sellers of ollas and drinking-gourds, of 
ponchos and saddles, of yellow earthen pottery and 
big vessels for cooking the chupe, their national dish. 

Our wanderings finally brought us to the far end of 

[96] 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 

the main street just in time to see the garrison, a 
battalion of infantry, march out of its barracks with 
colours flying and headed by its band. The officers 
were Peruvians of Spanish descent, but the rank and 
file seemed entirely of Indian origin. They marched 
well, however, and looked like neat and self-respect- 
ing soldiers. When I asked why they paraded thus 
during the full market, I was told that every Sunday 
this was done to stimulate interest in the army and 
show the Indian youths what fine fellows they would 
be when their time came for military service. 

Half an hour later the cracked bells of the church 
began to chime, and we walked back to the little 
square in front of it. Here, nearly twelve thousand 
feet above the sea, sweet -peas and calla lilies, roses, 
dahlias, and geraniums were blazing in a perfect riot 
of colour. Inside the church all was hushed and still. 
Women in black rebosos, or gaily coloured shawls, 
sat or knelt upon the stone floor, and a crowd of men 
stood near the high altar where three officiants were 
celebrating low mass. 

It was a picture of quiet dignity, this church in- 
terior, the groups silhouetting handsomely against 
the pale-tinted walls and the gilded side-altars, the 

[97] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

alcaldes from the mountain villages standing apart, 
leaning upon their long canes bound about with 
silver, badges of the mayor's office. As the women 
removed their hats to cover their heads with shawls, 
coca leaves fell fluttering to the ground, and we 
noticed many of them wearing these same leaves 
pasted on their temples to deaden headaches. 

We were asked by the mayor of the city to go in- 
formally with him to the Club Nacional, my wife be- 
ing included in the invitation, though she was the 
only lady present. We enjoyed the experience, es- 
pecially the Incaic music that followed, played by an 
Indian, a descendant of the old stock. It was our 
first opportunity to hear these weird melodies, so 
sad, so plaintive in tone, so strange in their synco- 
pations, that were to follow us wherever we went in 
the mountains. He played, turn by turn, the old 
Inca dances, the yaravis sung by the women, and 
the gay marmeras danced nowadays by the com- 
mon people all over Peru. What an interesting 
opera could be woven upon these themes, with the 
romantic history of the Incas and the scenery of the 
country and quaint customs of these mountain peo- 
ple as a background! 

[98] 



THE OROYA RAILWAY 

Some of the Indian women are quite handsome, 
with their straight noses, full lips, and bronze- 
coloured skin, smooth and soft, that glistens in the 
sun. The men, too, have the hardy type of moun- 
taineers : their legs bare, fine, and strong, their chests 
deep, and their heads erect. Though dirty person- 
ally, their town is surprisingly clean for an isolated 
mountain community. 

The alcalde dined with us that evening, and we 
had an interesting discussion of Peruvian politics. 

We had half planned to visit Santa Rosa de Ocopa, 
a monastery in the mountains, upon our return jour- 
ney; but that did not prove feasible, so we proceeded 
directly back to Oroya, at which station we arrived 
several hours behind our schedule. To this fact, how- 
ever, we owed one of the most wonderful impressions 
of our entire trip : the crossing of the pass at sunset- 

As we emerged from the Galera tunnel that pierces 
Mount Meiggs at the top of the grade, nearly sixteen 
thousand feet above the sea, great clouds piled high 
about the summits of the mountains, whose peaks, 
copper, ashen, silver, or coral, stood glistening with 
eternal glaciers. As we started down the grade the 
evening mists began to rise, , hurry ing upward from 

[99] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

gorge, valley, and precipice to swell the gathering 
vapours — caught by winds and air currents, eddying 
hither and thither like the fumes from a witch's 
caldron. In these flying, ghost-like forms lakes ap- 
peared and disappeared from time to time, hanging 
suspended, as it were, in mid-air. 

Embattled peaks rose enormous through the fog, 
their bulk doubled by the mist, just as the depth 
of the gorges was rendered doubly terrifying by the 
mystery of bottomless pits and precipices whose bases 
were swallowed in swirling vapours. 

As we descended, the sun, with its last rays, shot 
shafts of lurid light through these scurrying mists 
that thus became great tongues of fire, licking the 
mountains like the flames of a giant conflagration — 
a Walhalla, a glorious apotheosis to this wonderful 
ride in the Andes. 

We passed the night at Matucana, half-way down 
the grade, and in the morning came down to Lima, 
to sea-level and the warmth of banana groves, jas- 
mine, and heliotrope after the snow and ice of the 
mountains. 



[100] 



SOUTHERN PERU 



SOUTHERN PERU 



A COAST HACIENDA 

THE Limari of the Chilian Line took us in a 
night from Callao harbour to the anchorage 
off Cerro Azul. Before us lay a typical 
Peruvian port, barren and dry, whose bleak sand 
hills made us exclaim: "Why have we accepted this 
kind invitation to spend a week in this desolate 
spot!" 

The doctor's boat came alongside, and presently 
the chalowpa of the port captain and with it a large 
lancia. This latter intrigued me, for, though manned 
by four stalwart oarsmen, it contained no cargo of 
any description. Its bottom was covered with a 
great tarpaulin on which stood two empty chairs, its 
sole passenger being a man in white whose bronzed 
face was shaded by a cork helmet. I was wonder- 
ing how we would get ashore, when this man in 

[103] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

white stepped up and, introducing himself, asked if 
we were not the expected guests of Sefior H . 

He proved to be the port agent, British as could be, 
of the great sugar estate for which we were bound, 
and soon, with our luggage, we were comfortably in- 
stalled in the two chairs upon the tarpaulin and were 
making for the shore, riding the surf until we beached 
some fifty feet or so beyond the dry sand. Several 
men waded out for the luggage; my wife was put 
into a chair carried by three men, while I was told to 
bestride a big fellow's shoulders as he waded ashore 
with me. A queer procession we must have made! 

Our host was down to the port to meet us, and 
presently, after a comforting cup of tea in the agent's 
house (it was yet very early in the morning), we were 
put into a carrito, or little car running on narrow- 
gauge tracks and drawn by a fat, white mule. A 
Jap lashed up the animal, constantly shouting "Mula, 
mula," as we sped around the promontory that gives 
the port its name — the Blue Hill. 

In an instant the whole aspect of the country 
changed as if by magic, a change so startling that 
it fairly staggered us — the coast desert transformed 
in a moment from sandy wastes to broad cotton- 

[104] 







Landing at f'erro Azul 



SOUTHERN PERU 

fields and acres upon acres of sugar-cane. A tall 
factory chimney loomed up in the distance; then a 
Japanese village with its temple set among the 
banana-trees came into view; then a larger native 
village; and finally the low, rambling hacienda, an 
extensive group of buildings painted Venetian red 
and enclosing two patios, one set out with date- 
palms and a fountain, the other planted with flowers 
and entwined with honeysuckle. We were taken to 
large and airy rooms that faced the garden and 
tennis-court, with, beyond, a fine prospect of the 
sea, calm, placid, and blue beyond belief. 

It was now only nine in the morning (for we had 
made a very early start), and I spent the remaining 
hours until luncheon in walking through the sugar 
mill with my host. Santa Barbara is a very big 
plant, one of the largest on the West Coast, and 
thirty -five miles of railroad track feed its capacious 
maw. Train-load after train-load of cane, the "honey 
of reeds," draws up to the factory each day to spill 
its contents upon the endless chains that dump them 
onto the crushing-mills. Like all perfected machin- 
ery of this day, no human hand touches the product 
until the finished sugar, one hundred and fifty thou- 

[105] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

sand pounds a day, is sewn into sacks and put on 
flat-cars for shipment at the port. 

After luncheon we started, four of us, in the carrito 
for Casa Blanca, a large ranch some miles distant, 
the headquarters of the cultivation department. 
Here we found horses ready saddled and soon were 
riding off toward an isolated hill, the Cerro d'Oro, a 
barren peak bearing Inca ruins plainly visible upon 
its summit. As we climbed its sandy heights beau- 
tiful views of the valley began to unfold themselves. 

To the westward the sea glittered like silver in the 
afternoon light; to the north, parched and baked and 
blistered by eternal sunshine, the arid foot-hills lay 
seamed like wrinkled old mummies; but to the east, 
in violent contrast to this desolation, the broad 
Cafiete valley, under the fecundating touch of its 
river and countless irrigating ditches, bloomed into 
verdant fields of cane, vivid, velvety, stretching like 
a vast green carpet to the far foot-hills that rose, 
pale, ashen, and sandy, to buttress the grand Cor- 
dillera towering high into the heavens. 

Upon attaining the summit of the hill there lay 
about us the ruins of a dead civilisation. House 
walls of sun-baked adobe brick, with doorways still 

[106] 



SOUTHERN PERU 

intact; fragments of a well-planned fortress; and 
lower down a cemetery wall beyond which we could 
see innumerable human bones and row upon row 
of skulls glistening in the sunshine amid strips of 
mummy wrappings of vicuna cloth, exhumed by the 
shifting sand. 

We rode down the other side to San Luis, and in 
the carrito again drove for miles through the cane- 
fields of the vast estate to the Nuevo Mundo. Here 
we found other horses and, in the now westering 
light, rode through hills scratched with andenes, or 
Inca terraces, dating from the days when that pa- 
tient people, by means of aqueduct and tunnel, de- 
flected whole rivers to fertilise their crops. These 
irrigating ditches are still in use, serving as models 
to the Spaniards. 

Each hill hereabout is topped with its Inca ruins. 
Like the mediaeval builders, these Peruvian Indians 
of the coast region chose the hill tops for their settle- 
ments, thus protecting themselves alike from wan- 
dering bands of marauders and the miasmas of the 
coast marshes. We returned to Santa Barbara in 
the waning twilight, with the crescent moon and 
the Southern Cross to guide us. 

[107] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

So ended our first day at Cerro Azul. 

I had asked myself in the morning, "Why did I 
come?" Now I was answered. This single day had 
given me the most vivid picture of one of those Inca 
valleys described by the ancient chroniclers, scarcely 
believable upon this rainless coast — valleys that light 
its desert wastes with their emerald fields wherever 
a torrent pours from the Andes down to the sea; 
valleys that support the lonely coast-towns and pro- 
duce the barges of sugar, the bales of cotton, the 
herds of cattle that are hoisted aboard the steamer 
at every port. 

The days that followed strengthened this picture 
and added to its details. Each brought its little ex- 
pedition. 

One morning we visited the Japanese village whose 
picturesque little lanes, shaded by banana palms, 
put to shame the shiftlessness and dirt of the cholo 
quarter — the inevitable galpon that houses the half- 
breed working population of every Peruvian hacienda. 

Another day we rode to the Seal Rocks along the 
hard-packed sands of the coast. Our horses at times 
galloped through the surf itself; then again we were 
cut off from the sea by hummocks and rocky promon- 

[108] 



SOUTHERN PERU 

tories and reaches of barren sand dunes. Oh, the 
loneliness of this shore, the desolation of these dunes ! 
Never a tree, nor a shrub, nor a blade of grass. Only 
at times the gulls fishing along the beach, or the 
skeleton of a pelican whitening in the sand, or a flock 
of buzzards hovering over a dead seal cast up by the 
breakers. 

Yet we were following the main coast highway to 
Lima, a hundred miles or less to the north, though 
only a furrow in the sand and a single line of telegraph- 
poles marked its progress. Our ride terminated at 
Lobos Rock, where the seals lay wriggling in great 
families, the sound of their barking rising even above 
the roar of the surf. We watched them for some 
time, until our horses grew restless and the sun be- 
gan to sink behind the rocky islets that lifted their 
purple heads above the sea. 

We struck out for home in the short twilight of the 
tropics through the lonely sands, and on the way 
passed three cholos eating their frugal meal oblivious 
of the coming darkness, preparing for their long walk 
toward Lima, going, as they always do, by night to 
avoid the heat, trudging the endless sandy miles of 
the coast wilderness. So went the determined old 

[109] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

conquistadores when Pizarro met Almagro at Mala, 
so went the Inca runners, so goes the cholo and the 
Indian to-day. 

Our longest excursion took an entire day. Early 
in the morning we went in the carrito as far as Monte 
Alban, a superintendent's ranch at the farthest 
limits of the estate, the scene of several Spanish 
tragedies. There we found horses and were joined 

by Sefior L , son of the Vice-President of Peru, 

who was to be our companion for the day and whose 
home we were to visit later on. Our little cavalcade 
of six started through the village, San Vicente, whose 
freshly painted church and clean plaza set with 
gardens told of its prosperity, and out between the 
baked mud walls that serve as fences and are so 
characteristic a feature of this coast region of Peru, 
until we reached the hacienda of Hualcara. Here we 
paused for a while and refreshed ourselves in its patio 
garden aglow with flowers and embowered with great 
clusters of the pink bellissima, a beautiful vine — 
Japanese, I believe — that thrives particularly well in 
these latitudes. 

In the saddle again, we struck off for the hills. 
In a moment the cotton-fields and the acres of sugar- 

[110] 



SOUTHERN PERU 

cane were gone and we entered a dry, parched desert, 
the desolation of the moon, without a vestige of life 
either animal or vegetable. Through this arid, stony 
waste we crossed a long abutment of the Sierra and 
came at last out above a broad valley watered by the 
main fork of the Canete, a valley we had not yet 
seen, green from end to end, traversed by long files 
of trees and dotted with ranches. At its upper end, 
just under the shadow of the mountains and com- 
manding the pass that ascends their rugged defiles, 
rose an isolated cone, the key of the valley, known 
throughout the country as the Fortaleza— the Fort- 
ress. 

As we approached it we could plainly see extensive 
ruins upon its summit, remains of the great Inca 
stronghold that defended their mountain kingdom 
against the invaders. But these ruins along the coast 
possess neither the interest nor the grandeur of the 
massive structures that we saw later on the interior 
plateaus. Built of adobe bricks, not of giant stones, 
they are specimens of the decadence of the Inca 
builder's craft, dating as they do from but a century 
or two before the Spanish conquest. 

We circled the hill to view them from every side, 

[111] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

and as we returned, hungry and thirsty, two riders 
appeared, as from a rub of Aladdin's lamp, leading 
a pack-animal with lunch-baskets. Where had they 
sprung from? Only a laugh from our host as in the 
cool shade of a willow we selected a spot for our 
mid-day meal. An old Indian brought us 'ponchos 
to sit upon from his rude cane hut near by; the 
birds were singing in the canebrakes, and a little 
stream went rushing merrily by in its mad race from 
the Andes to the sea. 

After lunch we crossed this stream and followed 
down its valley, fording it a dozen times in its mean- 
derings, riding single-file through the bamboo jungles, 
the tail and crupper of the pacing pony ahead ap- 
pearing and disappearing as we sped along. 

We finally emerged into the main Cafiete valley and 
paused awhile to visit an old bull-ring quite unique 
in its way. Its only gradas are a sort of balcony or 
loggia painted with statues of Roman emperors and 
with vines and the fittings of a pergola. The entire 
barrera, or wall surrounding the ring, is frescoed with 
great figures, life-size, and now partially effaced by 
time, depicting all the phases of a bull-fight: the 
picador and his horse gored by the infuriated animal; 

[112] 



SOUTHERN PERU 

the banderilleros adroitly placing their multi-coloured 
darts; the lithe matador sighting his sword for the 
final thrust; even to the exit of the dead animal 
dragged out at the heels of the arrastres. 

As we left the ring the four wonderful Norfolk 







'^Si&J^SlBOtt^^^t.^.^ ^^Jgg&t 



Bull-Ring in the Canete Valley 



r-CN^.TT. .., 



Island pines, straight, tall, and branched like giant 
candelabra— the quartette of trees that make Unanue 
so conspicuous a landmark in the valley — raised 
their lofty heads before us, and from time to time we 
could descry the pinnacles and loggias of the beauti- 
ful hacienda rising above the intervening meadows. 
We were to stop for tea at this home of the Vice- 

[113] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

President, and presently were dismounting in its 
vast fore-court, where the white oxen were being 
unyoked from the plough and the farm implements 
stood neatly ranged under sheds at either side. 




V<-*..^OA- -m-*.. 



Hacienda of Undnue 

The great villa that confronted us was quite un- 
like any that I have seen — the dream of some French 
architect who let his imagination run riot. With its 
massive basement pierced only by narrow loopholes 
and a single entrance door, its upper terrace shaded 
on every side by arched verandas, its windows barred 
with iron rejas, its battlemented roof-line, and the 

[114] 




The Carrito and Itn (lalloping Mule 



SOUTHERN PERU 

elaborate spires of its porch, it is a strange combina- 
tion, fanciful to a degree, like some story-book palace 
set in this remote valley, fortified against an imagi- 
nary foe, yet a pleasure palace withal, enclosed by its 
tangled gardens shaded by giant trees. 

We ascended the double stairway to the broad 
loggia that commands a view in every direction to- 
ward the sea, the river valleys, and the mountains. 
The cool air of these verandas, paved with Italian 
marble, and of the rooms, cooler still, that surround 
the main patio, was grateful indeed after the glare of 
the road and the heat of the afternoon sun. We lin- 
gered until rather late over refreshing beverages, and 
the sun was already setting as we bade our host 
good-bye and started homeward by way of Santa 
Rita, another ranch at which we left Our horses 
with an attendant and found awaiting us the now 
familiar carrito and its galloping mule. 



[115] 



II 

TO AREQUIPA 

OUR visit at Santa Barbara had come to 
an end. Early Sunday morning we drove 
down to the port where in the offing lay the 
Panama, that was to take us on down the coast. Our 
host put us off in the same lancha that had brought 
us ashore, the agent accompanied us to the ship and 
presented us to the captain, and by ten o'clock we 
had weighed anchor. By good fortune I found among 

the passengers a man I had already met, Dr. G , 

rector of the University of Cuzco, Peru's second 
oldest seat of learning, and a friend of his, a writer 
and archaeologist of distinction. In the ship's saloon 
we talked over the interest of the trip that lay before 

us, and, to whet our appetite, Senor C showed 

us some priceless picture cloths of pre-Inca design 
— condor, puma, and serpents intertwined — that he 
had just unearthed somewhere near lea. 

In the afternoon we sighted the Chincha Islands, 

[116] 



SOUTHERN PERU 

white, flat-topped, like half-melted icebergs, cele- 
brated for their guano deposits, a semicircle of them 
off Pisco fringing the horizon. 

Pisco's gaily painted houses soon emerged from 
the sea and we cast anchor. Dark Indian women 
came aboard selling the luscious Italia grapes for 
which the valley is noted, and from which is made the 
Italia brandy and the "pisco," that alcoholic bever- 
age so much used along the coast, some of it so strong 
that, to quote a graphic expression that I heard, "it 
would make a rabbit fight a bull-dog." 

Pisco scarcely repaid us for the visit ashore. The 
town itself lies too far away to be conveniently visited 
in a few hours. So we had to content ourselves with 
the settlement along the beach — a series of bath- 
houses and small hotels like some miniature Coney 
Island. We stopped next day at another forlorn port, 
Chala by name, with a flimsy wooden church stuck 
in a plaza of shifting sand and a few frame houses 
set upon the same unstable foundation. 

What the shore lacked in interest the sea made up 
for. It literally teemed with life. Sea-lions bobbed 
their heads up and down upon its surface; schools of 
dolphins frolicked about, while flocks of shags and 

[117] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

murres hovered over them; long files of pelicans 
lazily flapped their way toward the guano-coated 
rocks behind which purplish mountains now rose 
abruptly from the sea. All afternoon we coasted 
near the shore and toward night enjoyed a splendid 
sunset. 

Early next morning the clang of the engine bell 
and the clank of the mooring-chains told us we had 
anchored. In the grey dawn the shore looked not 
unlike Salaverry, but a larger town lay spread upon 
the cliffs half hidden in the haze of spindrift. The 
Pacific rollers thundered in long surges against the 
rocks, and the boats coming out to meet us bounced 
like corks upon the sea. Yet it was an exceptionally 
calm morning for Mollendo, so we were told! As I 
was choosing afletero among the various brigands who 
presented themselves to ferry us ashore, a Spaniard 
stepped up and presented his card — an official from 
the Southern Railways of Peru. 

He soon had us installed in his stanch boat, and 
with the aid of a peppery tug, the first I had seen at 
the small ports of the coast, we were cutting our way 
through the water while the other boats were still 
bobbing about by the steamer's side. 

[118] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

In behind the break-water all was animation. 
Busy cranes were loading and unloading barges, a 
railroad engine was puffing back and forth switching 
freight-cars to and fro, and along the quays and on 
the landing-steps a jostling crowd was pushing and 
shouting. We scrambled ashore and were met by 
the station-master who had us and our luggage 
quickly transferred to the private car that was to 
take us to Arequipa — the same car (though we did 
not then know it) that afterward was to be our home 
for weeks. 

Our train was not to leave until one o'clock, so 
several hours of leisure lay before us. 

Mollendo, however, presented few attractions. It 
looks as San Francisco must have looked in the fifties 
— its frame houses set in sand dunes. Much of the 
town overhangs the sea, clinging to the bluffs, so that 
many of the dwellings present three stories to the 
ocean and only one to the land. Such a house, for 
instance, is the Club, a well-managed institution to 
which we were kindly taken, and where we enjoyed 
an excellent lunch on a terrace overlooking the 
broad Pacific, whose thundering surges beat along 
the shore at our feet. 

[120] 



SOUTHERN PERU 

Just before we boarded our train a curious incident 
occurred. 

A little Indian boy, some six or seven years old, 
approached us and, with tears in his eyes and his 
voice choked with sobs, asked to become our chico, 
our boy — literally and of his own free-will giving him- 
self to us for life. His tale was pitiful indeed. An 
aunt had brought him down from the mountains 
and had left him here by the coast and disappeared, 
whether by boat or train he did not know. We were 
quite touched by his appeal, and had it not been for 
the friend who accompanied us — a Peruvian-born — I 
do not know what might not have happened. He as- 
sured us, however, that the boy was shamming, that 
he wanted to go back to the mountains, to be sure, 
but that as soon as he got a favourable opportunity 
he would run away; in fact, that if we put him in 
the second-class coach we should never see him when 
we arrived; that this sort of appeal to strangers was 
a regular thing, and so on. 

Who was right I do not know. But I do know 
that boys of this age and even younger, and girls, too, 
of the inferior Indian race, are attached to the person 
of each young Peruvian child of the upper class and 
brought up with them for life. We constantly saw 

[ 121 ] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

such little slaves carrying coats or bundles or um- 
brellas behind their little masters, who walked ahead 
with their parents — a pernicious custom, to my 
mind, breeding arrogance, insolence, and a habit of 
idleness in the better-born children. We spoke to 
the station-master about the little waif and he prom- 
ised to look out for him. I hope he did. 

We pulled out at the tail of the afternoon passenger 
promptly on time, skirted the shore for a bit to the 
bathing resorts of Ensenada and Mejia, and then 
struck for the hills and Arequipa. 

The road ascends by a series of loops and curves 
among rounded foot-hills whose fat flanks are covered 
only with a tough-looking herb, dull brown and in 
spots green. Now and then we caught glimpses of 
one of those verdant valleys that lie tucked away 
down by the coast. This soon passed from sight, 
however, and at an elevation of about a thousand 
metres we emerged onto a succession of broad table- 
lands backed by blue mountains, whose gorges are 
filled with white sand that, at a distance, looks like 
snow-patches. 

As we proceeded these sandy drifts approached 
the track, sometimes descending the mountains in 
long ridges like giant reptiles' tails, sometimes form- 

[122] 



SOUTHERN PERU 

ing pools or hillocks, but oftenest of all piling up 
in those strange sand-crescents that are one of the 
phenomena of the region. 

These crescents are quite perfect in form, highest 
and broadest at the centre, diminishing with perfect 
regularity both in height and thickness toward the 
two horns that curve a bit inward like the Turkish 
moon. Hundreds of them lie spotted over this table- 
land, each with its horns pointed eastward, each mov- 
ing like clockwork in the same direction. For they 
move. Their tiny white particles, that hum in the 
heat, are fanned by the wind and chased over the 
summit, dropping down on the other side. Thus, 
particle by particle, irresistibly they pursue their 
onward march. They must be shovelled from the 
railroads like snow-drifts, though we were told that 
a few large stones placed upon them would break 
them up and prevent their movement. 

The stations along these plateaus are but tiny 
oases — palms, fruit trees, flowers set in a waterless 
waste. After San Jose you begin to climb again 
through salmon-tinted mountains, stratified and 
shaded like those of the Grand Canyon of the Colo- 
rado. Deep down in their chasms narrow valleys 

[123] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

appear — green, rich meadows where cattle graze 
and Indian bamboo huts nestle by the rivulets. 

At Vitor, where the women were selling delicious 
grapes by the station, we had reached an altitude of 
five thousand feet and soon could look across the 
broad upper plateau that now spread out before us. 
At a turn of the road in the distance Chachani and 
El Misti, the two Andean sentinels, suddenly stood 
revealed in all the glory of their icy summits, nearly 
twenty thousand feet above the sea! 

The scenery now became remarkable — grand. 

At times we looked deep into the valley of the 
Chili, with its verdant fields and Indian villages set in 
clusters of banana palms; at others into arid chasms 
where the blue evening shadows were slowly creep- 
ing upward while the coppery sunlight still flickered 
on the upper walls. And at each turn we obtained 
new views of the two mountain giants that marked 
our destination and that grew nearer and ever 
nearer, now rosy in the evening glow. 

The short twilight had deepened. Tingo's lights 
burst forth in the semi-darkness, and in ten minutes 
we pulled into the station at Arequipa. 

[124] 



LA VILLA HERMOSA 



LA VILLA HERMOSA 

THE acting superintendent of the Southern 
Railways was there to greet us, and soon 
we were rattling, with him, in the dark of the 
early evening, over the cobble-stones to the hotel. 
How like Spain it all was — perhaps even more 
Spanish than Spain, for it lacked every taint of cos- 
mopolitanism! 

Suddenly we emerged into the plaza and a moment 
later stepped out upon our porch speechless at what 
lay before us. The great bell of the Compania, just op- 
posite, was tolling for vespers, and its deep, bass voice 
was answered by the jangling but sweet-toned chimes 
of the other churches and by the slow, irregular thud 
of the cathedral bell. We were standing on top of 
the Portales, or stone arcades of beautiful design, 
that completely surround the plaza on three of its 

[127] 







The Cathedral from the Mercaderes 



LA VILLA HERMOSA 

sides. Below us lay flower-beds, palms, and broad, 
curving pathways whose glistening tile pavements, 
clean as mirrors, reflected the arc lights above. A 
quiet crowd was slowly moving about, for a military 
band was playing off in one corner. 

Directly opposite loomed the long fagade of the 
cathedral, above which we could faintly descry the 
shadowy forms of Misti, rising to its snow-capped 
cone in all the perfect symmetry of its pure volcanic 
outline, and of its rugged neighbour, Chachani, cut 
into a multitude of peaks and ice-fields and rocky 
pinnacles. "Where," we asked ourselves, "could we 
find such another combination, a great metropolitan 
cathedral fronting a monumental plaza and backed 
by two such mountain giants?" 

And the spell of this first impression did not wear 
off. 

We dined that evening with friends at the Central 
— a good Spanish dinner — after which we were 
amused by an Indian flower-boy who, though ugly 
and ill-formed, danced by our table, and with roll- 
ing eyes recited quaint pensamientos of languishing 
themes. 

As we walked about the streets next morning we 

[129] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

were struck by the pretty, gay aspect of the town, 
and of its dwellings painted in pale pastel tones, rose, 
pale ochre, Nile green, and pearly grey, but most 
of all azul — those blues that shade from faint, cool 
white to the deep tones of the azure sky. In the open 
court-yards oleanders bloomed and the tessellated 
tufa pavements were shaded by fig, orange, and lemon 
trees. 

I should call Arequipa the Silent City. No carts 
rattle on its thoroughfares, its donkeys' feet are un- 
shod, and even its little tram-cars fail to drown the 
murmur of the rushing rivulets that course down its 
open gutters. 

It is the second city in size in Peru, and its founder, 
Garcia Manuel de Carvajal, called it La Villa Her- 
mosa — the Beautiful City — and it well deserved its 
name. Its present appellation is Quichua in origin, 
and is said to have originated from the fact that a 
party of Inca soldiers once came upon this lovely 
valley of the Chili, hidden in the dreary Andean soli- 
tudes, and asked their commander to allow them to 
remain. His reply was, "Ari, quepai"; that in 
Quichua means "Yes, remain." 

Its elevation, some seventy-five hundred feet 

[130] 




The Cathedral and Chachani 



LA VILLA HERMOSA 

above the sea, gives it a delightful climate, quite 
spring-like in character, and of its forty thousand in- 
habitants a large proportion are gente decente, for it 
has long been recognised as a centre of culture and 
the residence of men of distinction. 

The courtesy of the Arequiperlians is beyond ques- 
tion. Each time you stop to look into a court-yard 
some one has a pretty way of asking you to come in 
and "take a seat." Then you are presented with 
flowers and apologies are made that the season is late 
and flowers not what they were a month or two ago. 
And what pretty, dark-eyed young women in lacy 
mantillas you meet coming home from church on 
Sunday morning! 

Let me tell you of an Arequipenian Sunday, to 
complete the picture, for Arequipa is essentially a 
religious town and lives its full life on Sunday. 

You are waked in the morning by the bells of the 
Compania, big and small, pealing forth in carillons; 
then, when their vibrant notes have died away, 
you distinguish the silvery distant chimes of other 
churches; then a sound of voices chanting, accom- 
panied by slow martial music. You look out and see 
a procession making a tour of the plaza — a brother- 

[131] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

hood bearing a great crucifix, followed by priests and 
the soldiers of the garrison. 

By ten you are out and cross the plaza to the cathe- 
dral and watch the Indian small boys, barefoot and 
nimble, who noiselessly carry from each home the 
priedieu, or chair of their mistress, gradually filling 
all the carpeted nave with them. The great organ 
peals forth, and feminine Arequipa, in sober black, 
troops in for high mass. 

After this morning function there is a lull till about 
two o'clock, when all the men of the town and some 
of the women wander down to the bull-ring, where 
Bomba or Segurito, according to the posters, will 
fight six "hermosos toros." And splendid bulls they 
are, to be sure, or were the day we saw them. I have 
seen no such thrilling fights in Spain as we witnessed 
here, and would not care often to undergo such ex- 
citement. Here in Peru the picador is practically 
suppressed; in fact, often totally so. Hence there are 
none of the gory horse episodes, and the matador 
takes the great, long-horned animal while he is still 
quite fresh and untired. 

The pluck of the two espadas that we saw that day 
was astounding. They knelt in the ring, vaulted the 

[132] 




Court of a Residence 




Church of La Com-pania 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

animal, or turned calmly from him so that he just 
grazed them in his infuriated rushes, playing all the 
tricks of their hazardous calling, cheered to the echo, 
until one was finally caught by the bull and severely 
wounded. 

We returned to the plaza, where a military con- 
cert was now in full swing. If the women had pre- 
sented a sober picture at the cathedral in the morn- 
ing, not so now at this afternoon promenade. Decked 
in their smartest gowns and escorted by gay young 
officers and obsequious young men, they sauntered 
in groups of three or four round and round the glazed- 
tile walks among the flowers and palmettoes. 

We went with two friends (one of them the Amer- 
ican minister at La Paz) to the zarzuela that evening. 
A fairly good company was playing an old favourite, 
the melodramatic "Mancha que limpia," and a good 
house was in attendance. The scene was certainly 
characteristic of a Latin play-house, the main floor 
occupied for the most part by the men, the three tiers 
of boxes filled with elaborately dressed women, and 
the peanut-galleries crowded to suffocation with the 
small trades-people. 

The town reserves a number of picturesque corners 

[134] 



• 





<?-'^--^ : - /-V'-Lr rfvL,' f'";>^- ; 



WT l 




Arequipa from the Bridge Across ike Chili 




Entrance to the old Bishop's Palace 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

for him who will ferret them out. There is the mar- 
ket; there are the old palaces and churches orna- 
mented with those extravagant plateresque carvings 
done by the Indians under the guidance of their 
Spanish conquerors; there is the great stone bridge 
that spans the Chili, with its massive piers and but- 
tresses that remind you of their prototypes at Toledo; 
there are the long street vistas, with Chachani or 
Misti ever framed at the far extremity. 

And in the evening you may drive out over the 
rough country road to a bit of American soil — the 
observatory that Harvard University maintains here 
for the study of the southern heavens — and see the 
stars sit for their portraits taken by its wonderful 
photographic telescopes. It is strange, indeed, to 
find this astronomer's home, so absolutely American 
in all its appointments, perched on the far flanks of 
El Misti, and there to pass an evening in the genial 
warmth of an enthusiastic young American's fireside. 



[136] 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

AS you ascend from Arequipa to cross the back- 
L\ bone of the Andes on this Southern Rail- 
-* ^ way of Peru, leaving behind the dreary 
waste-lands of the upper Cordilleras, devoid of life 
and vegetation except for the pajonal, the only 
grass that clothes the highest plateaus with its 
stubby golden carpet, where no bit of green has 
rested the eye since the lovely valley of the Chili 
faded from view and the eternal snows of Chachani 
and Misti dropped lower and lower toward the hori- 
zon; after topping the pass at Crucero Alto, some 
fifteen thousand feet above the sea, you descend 
the eastward side by loops and gradients about two 
thousand feet or more. Vicunas, the sole habitants 
of these mountain solitudes, graze in the ychu grass 
by the tracks, and at lower levels llamas and sheep. 
The flocks and herds increase in size as you de- 

[139] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

scend. Occasionally clusters of huts appear in whose 
doorways women are seated weaving 'ponchos, their 
mouths muffled against the icy breeze. A chain of 
lakes now borders the road, one bright and peaceful, 
the next shaded by heavy clouds, dark, tragic as the 
tarn of the House of Usher. Snow-peaks close in 
the vista to the left, while ahead opens a broad val- 
ley, the great basin of Lake Titicaca. 

You quickly realise that you are entering another 
world — a strange world shut off from the remainder 
of our planet by every^ barrier that nature could de- 
vise. To the east tower the White Cordillera, beyond 
which moulder the miasmic jungles of the Montana; 
to the west rise the snowy altitudes we have just 
traversed. Between these two ranges lie a succession 
of highland valleys some ten to thirteen thousand 
feet above the sea, each separated from the other by 
nudos, or knots, of lesser transverse chains of moun- 
tains. 

These valleys in our latitudes would be covered 
with eternal snow. Here, under the tropics, they 
blossom with all the products of the temperate zone, 
enjoying a cool, invigorating climate and supporting 
a large population of Indians. 

[140] 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

They constituted the heart of the ancient empire 
of the Incas, that amazing despotism tnat stunned 
the Spanish conquerors with the wisdom of its in- 
stitutions, the splendour and the size of its buildings, 
the rich produce of its fields, and, above all, by the 
wealth of its mines of gold and silver and its amassed 
riches of centuries. When the Spaniard came, Hu- 
ayna Capac had already extended his dominions as 
far north as Quito and as far south as the land of 
the Araucanian Indians of Chili. Even most of the 
savage tribes of the Montana owed him allegiance, 
and only the Pacific bounded his territories to the 
westward. The centre of his empire lay in these 
high plateaus of the Andes— the fair and fertile val- 
leys of Huaylas and Vilcanota, the bare and bleak 
plains of Cerro de Pasco and Titicaca's basin. 

We were now entering the last-named, the most 
southern of the four, and were then to turn north- 
ward to visit the Inca capital, Cuzco, the navel of 
the kingdom, as its Quichua name signifies. 

It was toward the end of the rainy season. So, 
when we started from Juliaca in the morning the 
broad valley lay flecked with numerous pools of 
water that reflected the deep blue of the sky mingled 

[141] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

with the fleecy white of the small clouds that floated 
overhead. The air, after the night's rain, was of an 
indescribable rarity and purity, pellucid; so clear, 
indeed, that the distant Cordilleras showed every 
varied marking of their sharp ridges and deep que- 
bradas. Now and then, as we looked backward, 
Titicaca came into view, reflecting the hills of indigo 
blue that surround it. 

This lake is intimately connected with all the tales 
and legends of the Incas. In fact, the usually ac- 
cepted story of the origin of their race makes it 
spring from the waters of this very lake. Garcilasso 
de la Vega, himself a descendant of the Incas of the 
royal line, gives us a clear version of the story. 

Inti, the Sun-God, ashamed of the barbarous prac- 
tices of the primitive human beings who then in- 
habited the globe, taking pity upon them, sent to 
earth his two children, Manco Capac and his sister- 
wife, Mama Oello (Children of the Sun, as their 
descendants, the Incas, always styled themselves), 
causing them to rise from Titicaca and go forth to 
instruct the people: he in government and the arts 
of war and husbandry; she in weaving and spinning — 
his Coya, or queen of women, as he was king of men. 

[142] 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

Inti thus admonished them. " Tis I," said he, 
"who warm the earth and its inhabitants when they 
are cold, fertilise their fields and their pastures; 
who fructify their trees, multiply their flocks; who 
send them rain and fine weather in season. I make 
the tour of the world each day to see what is needful 
for its happiness. I reserve for myself only the 
pleasure of seeing it happy. Go, do likewise. Be 
happy if thou canst, but, above all, try to make other 
people happy." 

He gave them, too, a "barrilla de oro" of half a 
yard in length and two fingers in thickness that they 
were to take with them. They were to pursue their 
journey until this golden wedge, of its own accord, 
should sink into the earth, at which spot they were 
to establish the capital of their kingdom. Accord- 
ingly, they set forth upon their wanderings, never 
stopping until they reached the valley of Cuzco, 
where the golden wedge sank into the earth and dis- 
appeared. 

We were now following their footsteps from Tit- 
icaca's shore to this same valley. The fields were 
alive with flocks of sheep and herds of cattle and 
llamas; here and there groups of adobe huts thatched 

[143] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

with straw afforded shelter for their keepers. The 
names of the stations told us we were approaching 
the Quichua country, for, instead of the familiar San 
Miguel or San Jose, we read Calapuja, Tirapata, Aya- 
viri, and Chuquibambilla. Quichua was the ancient 
tongue of the Inca court, imitated by all the con- 
quered nations until it became the fashionable lan- 
guage, the most elegant of the South American 
tongues. It is still the spoken language of the Peru- 
vian Indian. 

Our train had now begun to climb, mounting 
through bleak pastures until we reached La Raya, 
the summit of one of those knots of mountains that 
connect the two main ranges of the Andes. The 
scenery was magnificent. We were shut in by great 
peaks set in fields of moss or grass that encircle their 
mighty cones, whose heads reach the realms of eter- 
nal silence and eternal snow. 

Two little streams rise at the top of the pass. One, 
the Puchara, starts down the valley we had just as- 
cended, finally to reach the Pacific; the other becomes 
the Vilcanota that, gathering strength as it proceeds, 
goes to swell the mighty Amazon, emptying into the 
Atlantic some three thousand miles or more away. 

[144] 



Sf 






^^^^^^ : V)'" ' 




*f*cf.w\ a 



N 



Pottery Vendors, Puchara 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

As we descended beside its bubbling waters — so 
soon, alas, to loose their crystal pureness — a beauti- 
ful valley opened before us, hemmed in by frowning 
mountains, the first of the valleys that the Incas 
chose as the central seat of their civilisation. The 
mountain slopes they terraced into rich andenes; 
they irrigated their fields and gardens, fortified their 
crags, and dotted their meadows with villages and 
cities. At the far end they built Cuzco, their capital, 
the great shrine of their deity the Sun, the venerated 
object of their pilgrimage. As Mecca is to the Mus- 
sulman, or Rome to the Catholic, so was Cuzco to 
the Inca. 

These valleys still remain well-tilled, their fields 
of wheat and barley alternating with patches of 
quinoa, the hardy grain that is indigenous to these 
mountain plains, their staple of life, thriving at an 
elevation of thirteen thousand feet. 

Before six o'clock we pulled into the station at 
Sicuani, there to remain for the night. 

Our itinerary had been planned with this in view, 
for Sicuani's Sunday-morning market is the most 
notable in all the region. This being Saturday even- 
ing, the llama trains were already arriving. After 

[146] 




At the Top of the Pass, La Raya 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

dinner, as we walked about the town, we saw whole 
troops of these strange beasts being driven into the 
corrals, craning their long necks, their ears tilted for- 
ward, suspicious, always on the alert, afraid to enter 
unknown enclosures. 

As we crossed the two squares on our return to 
our car, from the tiendas and chinganas that sur- 
round them came sad strains of music, sometimes a 
voice singing, sometimes a reedy flute plaintively 
crooning, sometimes a rude guitar strumming those 
sad yaravis, the sole musical expression of the Andean 
Indian — minor melodies, sad in theme and modula- 
tion, strange in their wilful syncopations, fitly voic- 
ing the melancholy, the sorrow of a down-trodden 
race. 

The environment of the Inca Indian has had great 
influence upon his temperament. He combines to a 
marked degree the nature of the easy-going inhabi- 
tant of the tropics with the hardihood and fortitude 
and capacity for toil of the mountaineer. On the 
bleak punas of this upper world of his, this "roof of 
the earth," as it has been called, his inscrutable ex- 
pression, his silences, and his quiet melancholy ac- 
cord well with the mysteries of the country. 

[147] 




\|f$\||P 










1 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

We were out early next morning, and the sun had 
not yet risen from behind the mountains, though the 
sky was bright, as we turned into the plaza. 

Already it was full of people. Here was the move- 
ment of the market-place, the bustle of the traders. 
But how quiet! Only silent groups stood about. 
They smiled once in a while, but quickly grew grave 
again; they scarcely ever laughed. As we listened, 
the singing of the birds — the numerous trigueras — 
drowned the human voices! 

The natives were constantly arriving. The sky 
grew brighter and brighter, and suddenly the fiery 
orb of the sun shot above the mountains and darted 
its rays in long shafts of light down upon the market- 
place. The chill of the early morning was dispelled 
as if by magic. Small wonder that the Incas in their 
bleak, fireless mountain homes worshipped him as 
their chief deity! 

And now, under his effulgence, the beauty of this 
Sunday-morning market became apparent. The 
houses around the plaza, hitherto grey and uninter- 
esting, now gleamed white or pale blue or caught 
golden reflections under their broad eaves and bal- 
conies from the yellow dust of the roadways. Upon 

[149] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

the surrounding hill-slopes flocks of llamas and 
trains of donkeys stood silhouetted with silver await- 
ing a purchaser. 

And the costumes! The men's were undoubtedly 
the finest. Their ponchos, or blankets, reaching to the 
knees, were woven in rich patterns and ornamented 
with coloured fringes; their sturdy, sun-browned 
calves and feet were bare or protected only by rude 
sandals; upon their heads they wore tight-fitting 
caps with ear-flaps, woven, too, in intricate designs 
like those of the poncho but far finer, the best being 
made of the beautiful vicuna wool, which, under the 
Incas, was reserved for the nobility alone. Their 
hair, long, black, and thick, showed front and back, 
and was clipped round, giving to their clear-cut 
features and aquiline noses the appearance of those 
splendid bronze heads modelled by Donatello and 
his school. 

The dominant colour note was red — scarlet, vary- 
ing through all the gamut of rose and warmed by 
intervening stripes of undyed ochre wool. 

The women wore the bright montero, a gay, broad- 
brimmed hat almost devoid of crown, ornamented 
with gold or silver galloon, and their principal gar- 

[150] 



. •: 




J. 



Comer of the Market, Sicuani 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

ment was the llicha or mantle in which they draped 
themselves. Before them, spread upon the ground, 
lay the various strange eatables that they sell: the 
dried birds and cockroaches; the chuno, or white 
potato (do you realise that we owe our common po- 
tato to these highlands of Peru?), that, boiled with 
bits of fish or meat, makes the chwpe, their national 
dish; the roundish grains of the quinoa; the charqui, 
or jerked meat made of venison or vicuna steaks; 
the bags of coca leaves that they chew to deaden 
their senses and efface the effect of cold, hunger, and 
fatigue as they take their almost superhuman walks. 

We started on for Cuzco in the morning, expecting 
to reach it by night. But fate willed otherwise, as 
you shall see. 

Along the roads the Indians were hurrying, some 
afoot, some on donkey -back, and once in a while we 
passed a single horseman draped in his ample poncho. 
Women, too, walked briskly with babies or incred- 
ibly large bundles upon their backs, picking their 
skirts high above their knees to ford the streams and 
pools. 

Beyond San Pablo we could make out the ruins of 
the great temple of Viracocha, off to the right, half- 

[ 151 1 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

hidden in a rocky country. Each station, as we 
passed, was full of people, the train being still a 
novelty, an object of interest. The villages became 
richer. Pottery roofs supplanted the flimsy thatch; 
substantial walls took the place of rude adobe. The 
now roaring Vilcanota was spanned, as at Quiquijana, 
by strong stone bridges. The fields were rich and 
the hills terraced far up toward their summits. 

The Incas surpassed all the American races as 
husbandmen. Agriculture was the key-note of their 
peaceful civilisation. The Inca himself set an exam- 
ple to his subjects by going out each year to the fields 
upon one of the great festivals and turning the sod 
with a golden plough. One-third of all the land was 
reserved for him (that is, for government), one-third 
for the practices of religion, and the remaining third 
was equally distributed among the people. Each 
man upon his marriage was given an extra piece and 
likewise upon the birth of each child, twice as much 
for a boy as for a girl. Besides cultivating his own 
portion, he was obliged to work one-third of his time 
upon the Inca's land and one-third upon the Sun's. 
Thus, like bees, they droned for their Inca in a sort of 
socialistic equality. By patient toil and the force of 

[152] 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

numbers, combined with skilful irrigation and fer- 
tilising (even the use of guano was known to them), 
they brought these highland valleys and terraced 
hills to a state of productiveness that they have never 
since attained under their Spanish conquerors. 

Most of the great work of the Incas — their mighty 
roads that connected Quito with Cuzco; their aque- 
ducts, sometimes hundreds of miles in length; their 
rich andenes — have fallen to ruin, but enough of them 
remain to put to shame the feeble efforts of their con- 
querors. 

About four hours beyond Sicuani the train stopped 
at a place called Urcos. Upon one side of the track 
stood the station; upon the other a sort of fonda — 
eating-house and lodgings combined. No town was 
in sight. The minutes passed by, and presently men 
began to drop off and ask questions of the conductor. 
His replies were evasive. An hour passed, and we 
were told that, owing to some trouble on the road 
ahead, we should remain where we were till evening. 
So, having nothing better to do, we set out to find 
the town. 

Happy thought! For no sooner had we climbed a 
wide path, a sort of causeway lined on both sides 

[153] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

with giant cacti of all descriptions, than we saw a 
picturesque red-roofed village ahead of us. We were 
walking toward the sun, and the llamas and people 
coming down toward us were edged with gold and sil- 
ver as the brilliant light caught the long nap of their 
woolly garments and fringes. We soon reached the 
first mud-built house sand stumbled up the winding, 
rock-paved streets, climbing higher and higher to- 
ward glimpses of gleaming white walls ahead. 

Suddenly we turned into the village green, for such 
it truly was, a perfect pastoral hidden in this moun- 
tain valley. Eight giant trees (pisonays, I think they 
are called) shaded its broad expanse, their gnarled 
trunks girdled with stone seats, their lustrous leaves 
shining and sparkling in the sunlight. In the shadows 
which they cast, groups of Indian women squatted 
with their children, and over by the village pump 
another group quietly gossiped. An old Spaniard, in 
his threadbare black coat and flashy tie, returned 
slowly from mass. A broad flight of steps, orna- 
mented with a tall stone crucifix, rose at the farthest 
end and led up to the church, whose single lava-built 
tower, dark and rich in tone, contrasted pleasantly 
with the white arcades that adjoined it. The long 

[154] 







/ r rcoa 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

afternoon shadows, the ruddy glow of the scarlet 
costumes, the mighty hills, fat-flanked, gouged by 
landslides, yet tilled to their very summits, composed 
a charming picture, and when we had enjoyed it for 
some time we mounted the steps to the church. 

It, too, well repaid our visit. Its walls and ceiling, 
though white, are almost completely covered with 
stencils, executed apparently by Indians, like those 
of the California missions, but far richer in design 
and bolder and more vigorous in pattern, and par- 
ticularly powerful in tone. They form the back- 
ground for a multitude of objects: paintings, not 
very good, to be sure, but following the fine old His- 
panic tradition and set in their original richly carved 
and gilded frames; polychrome statues of saints and 
martyrs in the golden niches of side altars, mingled 
with bits of altar-cloths and laces and old Spanish 
mirrors. The vandal hand of no city antiquary has 
as yet defiled this little treasure-house. May my 
pen never guide one thither! 

As we emerged from the portal a small voice piped 
up and asked if we should like to see the lake. 

The Lake of Urcos? Why had that name a familiar 
sound? Guided by our small conductor, we soon 

[155] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

came upon it set like lovely Nemi in its round vol- 
canic basin, a mirror reflecting the azure sky. The 
Lake of Urcos? I was still puzzled, but soon had 
solved the mystery. 

Now I remembered the passage in Garcilasso. 
Huayna Capac, last of the great Incas, upon the 
birth of the son that was to succeed him, caused to 
be forged a chain of gold, long enough, we are told, 
to stretch around the great square at Cuzco. And 
the Inca named his son Huascar, a chain. At the 
approach of the Spaniards this triumph of the gold- 
smith's art, a veritable fortune, was thrown, accord- 
ing to common belief, into this Lake of Urcos. Va- 
rious attempts have been made to dredge its waters 
and recover the buried treasure, but as yet all in 
vain — again reminding us of Nemi and its golden 
barge of Nero. 

When we returned to the station we found a tele- 
gram from the superintendent at Arequipa telling us 
that we should be obliged to remain at Urcos all 
night owing to a landslide on the road ahead. 

Now were we glad, indeed, of our private car, for 
the rest of the passengers had to make the best of it 
in the crowded quarters of the fonda, four in a room. 

[156] 



THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

The cholos slept upon the benches of their second- 
class coach. Faithful old Prudenzio, our Indian 
cook, had been off shopping in the town and we en- 
joyed our good dinner sitting by the window watching 
the natives with their long trains of llamas or donkeys 
making their way up the steep pathways that lead to 
their mountain homes. 

Where do they dwell? Neither house nor village 
was visible upon these rocky heights, yet doubtless 
hidden within their defiles nestle lonely huts protected 
from wintry winds. 

The water-carriers staggered toward the village 
under the weight of their earthen ollas; the sad 
strains of a yaravi floated over the meadows; the 
Vilcanota, rushing to swell the Amazon, murmured 
in the distance; the stars shone resplendent in the 
purity of the mountain air. What a happy day, 
unplanned and unpremeditated, we had spent quite 
by chance in this peaceful country-side — this won- 
derful land of the Incas! 

But next morning, when told that we should not 
start for Cuzco until noon, I began to be anxious. 
We were at the beginning of Holy Week, and I had 
been especially planning to reach the Inca capital on 

[157] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

this particular day, the feast of Our Lord of the 
Earthquakes — the principal Indian festival of the 
year. The great procession was to leave the cathe- 
dral at four o'clock, and Urcos is more than two 
hours' ride from Cuzco. We spent the morning 
sketching in the village, however, and in visiting a 
hospitable Spanish family, who asked us in (strangers 
are a rarity, indeed, in Urcos) to regale us with sweet- 
meats and coffee. A reassuring telegram awaited us 
upon our return to the station, telling us that we 
should leave by one o'clock. All might yet be well. 

And at one we left. A quick trip through a suc- 
cession of lovely valleys, where haciendas with long 
arcades sat embowered in eucalyptus groves, brought 
us to the considerable town of San Jeronimo, really 
a suburb of Cuzco. 

The railroad here makes an ascent, and at each 
curve of the road we tried to obtain our first glimpse 
of this sacred city of the Incas. At last, at a turning, 
there it lay with its domes and towers, its ring of 
encircling mountains, its red-roofed houses lying flat 
along its regular streets. 



[158] 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 



CUZCO, THE INC A CAPITAL 

THE neat new station (the road has been only 
open a year or two) lies outside the city 
walls. We lost no time in jumping into an 
old tram-car drawn by four mules, and presently 
were rattling through the narrow, crooked streets of 
the lower town, one of the worst quarters of the city 
— the dirtiest district of a dirty town. 

But all this was forgotten when we turned into the 
main plaza of the city. Picturesque arcaded houses 
surround it on every side; the great church of the 
Compania, with its belfries and domes, looms up in 
the centre of the southern side; while upon its east- 
ern front the grand cathedral faces the setting sun, 
raised high upon its lofty grada. 

Grouped upon these steps and in the plaza stood 
thousands of Indians — they told us fifteen thousand. 
Not shiftless, half-breed Indians in cast-off European 

[161] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

clothes, but fine-looking fellows developed like ath- 
letes by their hardy mountain life and draped in 
their most brilliant ponchos with their most elaborate 
pointed caps upon their heads. The garrison, Indians, 
too, except for the officers, stood drawn up at at- 
tention. A portion of the centre of the plaza was 
reserved for gentlefolk, and to this we made our way 
and were kindly admitted by the sentries on guard. 

We had scarcely taken our places before the cathe- 
dral when its sixteen bells began to toll, the rich 
tones of the great Maria Angola, whose voice can be 
heard for miles, sounding the deepest bass. 

A movement swept over the populace. The In- 
dians dropped upon their knees; the Spaniards re- 
moved their hats. From the door of the cathe- 
dral issued the procession. First came the alcaldes, 
the Indian mayors of all the provincial towns and 
villages, each carrying his great staff of office, a 
baton or cane varying in its size and the richness of 
its silver ornaments according to the importance of 
his community, some as tall as the men themselves, 
as thick as their fists, bound round and round with 
broad bands of silver engraved with rich designs. 
Next followed the brotherhoods, wearing, like those 

[162] 




* i ! - si ft H • 




o 



O 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

of Spain and Italy, hoods that concealed their faces; 
then the monks from the convents, mostly Francis- 
cans; then the civil authorities of Cuzco, the prefect 
of the department, the mayor, and other dignitaries; 
and after them the "Santo," followed by the clergy 
massed about their bishop. 

The Santo, or saint, is a great figure, some eight 
feet high, of the Christ crucified — a fine piece'of wood- 
carving sent over to the cathedral in the days of its 
infancy by the Emperor, Charles the Fifth. It is 
the Indian's most revered image — his special patron 
saint, stained by time, and perhaps by art as well, 
the colour of his own dark skin. Many miracles are 
attributed to it, among others the cessation of the 
great earthquake of 1650, whence its name, Our Lord 
of the Earthquakes. 

Once a year, and once only, on this particular 
Monday of Holy Week, it is taken from its glass- 
enclosed chapel, put upon its bulky pedestal, a 
mass of silver so heavy that thirty -two men stagger 
beneath its weight, while others follow along beside, 
ready to relieve them at frequent intervals. 

Thus, attended by the civil and ecclesiastical au- 
thorities, it is taken in solemn state to the principal 

[164] 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

churches of the city, followed by the garrison, whose 
muffled drums play funeral marches on the way. As 
it leaves the cathedral, boys, tied high up to the pillars 
of the portal, throw masses of crimson leaves upon it 
(the nucchu, or funeral flower of the Incas), redden- 
ing all its upper surfaces as with a shower of blood. 

Swaying back and forth upon its many unsteady 
human legs, slowly it makes its way through the 
silent, kneeling throng toward Santa Teresa. In the 
open square before this church the women are con- 
gregated, and, as they see it approach, they begin to 
moan and beat their breasts; tears start from their 
eyes and their emotion is evidently intense. Here 
also boys about the portal shower the funeral flowers. 
We did not wait to follow it farther, but made our 
way back to the main plaza, there to await its return. 
A kind young Peruvian, noting that we were stran- 
gers, with true courtesy invited us to occupy a win- 
dow in his home just opposite the cathedral. 

The sun had now set. Darkness was creeping on. 
The Indians were slowly coming back into the plaza. 
A few lights twinkled from one or two street-lamps — 
and I mean lamps literally, for gas has not yet ap- 
peared in Cuzco. 

[165] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

From the direction of La Merced came the sound 
of mournful music. The great plaza had filled again 
with people, a huge, silent throng. From one corner 
emerged the procession, now lit by flickering candles 
and dominated by the great dark figure of El Sefior 
de los Temblores. Slowly the lights approached the 
cathedral, finally mounting its long grees and group- 
ing themselves against the tight-shut doors of the 
central portal that formed a bright background. 

The great throng in the plaza was kneeling, and, 
as the black figure of the Santo mounted the steps and 
appeared silhouetted against the doors, a great moan, 
a sort of collective sob, swelling to a barbaric howl 
— a sound such as I had never heard before — as if 
in the presence of some dire calamity, swelled from 
the poor Indian throats; the black crucifix made 
three stately bows, to the north, to the west, to the 
south, in sign of benediction; a sigh of relief and a 
shudder passed over the square; the huge cathedral 
doors swung open; the black hole swallowed the 
image and the candles; the portals closed again, and 
all was finished. 

I offer no comment upon this weird ceremony. 
But in its spectacular appeal to the primitive senses 

[166] 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

it impressed us more than any other religious festival 
we had ever seen. 



The ancient city of Cuzco, when first viewed by 
European eyes, was, according to the best authorities, 




^Jk 



Old View of Cuzco after Ramusio's Woodcut 



a great and wealthy municipality of perhaps two 
hundred thousand souls. How old it was at that 
time we have scant means of knowing. Garcilasso 
would have us believe that there were only thirteen 
Incas in the royal line from Manco Capac to Huayna 
Capac; Montesinos, on the other hand, assures us 
that the Incas ruled for a thousand years! Which 
are we to believe? No written history of the race 

[167] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

exists — only the records of the quipus, those queer 
knotted strings that were the Incas' sole documents 
and for which no archaeologist has as yet discovered 
the key, the Rosetta stone. 

Cuzco's original plan was, singularly enough, that 
of the Roman camp, a quadrangle divided by two 
intersecting streets into quarters, with a gate on each 
face and towers at the angles. Ramusio gives an 
interesting woodcut, here reproduced, of the city as 
it appeared to the conquerors. 

The Incas, like the citizens of the United States, 
had no more definite name for their country than 
Tavantinsuyu, the Empire of the Four Provinces. 
The four streets of the capital, prolonged by great 
roads, divided it into four main provinces, each 
under the dominion of its governor. When their 
people came to Cuzco they lodged in their own 
quarter, where they adhered to the costumes and 
customs of their own province. 

The city to-day retains the same general plan, its 
two principal streets being practically the old main 
thoroughfares. Its two eastern quarters lie upon steep 
hillsides; the two western are in the valley where 
runs a little river, the Huatanay, spanned by bridges. 

[168] 




Arco di Sla. Clara, Cuzco 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

The northeast quarter was the Palatine Hill of 
this South American Rome, and contains the palaces 
of the kings, for each Inca, after the manner of the 
Roman emperors, built his own abode, scorning to 
live in that of his predecessor. Along the steep streets 
of this portion of the city extensive remains of the 
foundations and walls of these palaces still remain, 
their giant stones and perfect masonry provoking 
the constant wonder of the traveller. Pictures of 
them give but a poor impression, for the heavy rustic 
finish of the face of each stone hides the perfection 
of the joints, which are so finely fitted that, devoid 
of mortar as they are, the blade of a small pocket- 
knife can scarcely be inserted into any one of them. 

The Incas were not artists. Their buildings dis- 
played neither imagination nor beauty of detail, but 
were characterised rather by stern simplicity and 
extreme solidity of construction. Had they not been 
used as quarries they undoubtedly would all be 
standing to-day, singularly well adapted as they are 
to the climatic conditions of this high-lying country, 
resisting storm and earthquake alike where the more 
modern Spanish buildings crumble to decay. 

The most extensive ruins left by the Incas, and 

[170] 




liicn Rocca'a Palace 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

perhaps the most interesting, are those of the great 
fortress Sachsahuaman, that stands perched upon 
the summit of a steep hill to the north of the town. 

To reach it you must climb between garden walls, 
up lanes laid out in rough steps, until you come to a 
little plaza in front of the chapel of San Cristobal. 
The cura was pacing up and down before his church 
when we stopped to ask him a question. He immedi- 
ately became communicative and we were glad that 
we had spoken, for he pointed out to us the many 
curiosities of his small domain. There was a queer 
row of pillories in which thieves were exhibited in the 
olden days; there was a curious Inca fountain, un- 
couthly cut to represent a female form, and near by, 
in a garden, raised upon a stone terrace, was all that 
remains of the ancient palace of Manco Capac, who, 
according to legend, was the founder of the royal 
dynasty. This, to my mind, is the building that oc- 
cupies the important north end of the city in Ramu- 
sio's wood-block. 

The property now belongs to a resident of Cuzco, 
an Italian, who has made it his quinta, or country 
home, and it is a charming spot indeed, nestled in a 
rustling forest of eucalypti. , There are several im- 

[171] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

portant Inca fragments scattered among these trees 
— sections of handsome walls, a well-preserved door- 
way, and extensive remains of terraces. 

The road thence up the mountain is a stiff climb 
in this altitude, and more than once we stopped to 
rest and catch our breath, and regret that we had 
not ordered donkeys on which to scramble up the 
rocky paths. Several times we passed llama trains 
coming down, and had to climb in the rocks to let 
the clumsy beasts go by. Finally we reached the 
first huge stones of the fortress and entered its portal, 
which, with its steps, is still in good preservation. 

Enough of the great walls remains to amaze one 
with their formidable character and vast extent. 
The Indians consider them the works of the Evil 
One, and small wonder, for how human hands ever 
reared these mighty stones upon this mountain top 
is quite beyond one's powers of speculation. The 
fort presents but a single line of defence, some twelve 
hundred feet long, toward the city, where the hill 
itself is so steep that it affords the best possible pro- 
tection, but to the country behind it shows three 
massive walls placed one above the other, arranged 
with salients (a device unknown to Europeans of that 

[172] 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

period) and breast-works for the defenders. The 
stones are cyclopean, many of them being eighteen to 
twenty feet long and almost the same in height; the 
largest, we are told, measuring no less than thirty- 
eight feet in length. 

Crowning these mighty walls was the fortress 
proper, consisting of three towers. The central one, 
the largest, was reserved for the Inca himself and 
contained his royal apartments. The other two were 
for the garrison commanded by a noble of the royal 
family. As in many mediaeval fortress castles, sub- 
terranean passages, also built of stone, connected 
these towers with the town below, thus affording a 
retreat for the Inca in time of peril. 

Upon the hill-slopes behind the fortress, in fields 
of flowering shrubs, where paroquets make their 
homes, stand some strange rocks called by the 
natives "thrones of the Inca." They are certainly 
cut with the nicest precision, each edge as sharp as 
it ever was, but I can scarcely see the reason for the 
appellation. 

We returned to the city toward sundown. The 
views, as we descended, were beautiful. The lovely 
valley, dotted with eucalyptus groves, lay green and 

[173] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 



radiant below us, framed by its towering mountains 
that peeped over each other's shoulders as they 
stretched away, fold upon fold, dimmer and yet more 
distant until they disappeared in far perspectives. 

The city that lay be- 
neath us, one-storied 
for the most part, flat 
along its regular 
streets, looks quite as 
it must have appeared 
to the Inca sitting in 
his fortress tower. 
Only now pottery 
roofs replace the 
thatch of straw or of 
ychu grass that covered the older houses, and the 
belfries and domes of numerous Spanish churches 
have supplanted the gilded walls and cumbersome 
masonry of the ancient Inca temples. 

These last lay for the most part in the southeast 
quarter of the city and were dominated by the great 
Temple of the Sun, the most revered sanctuary in all 
the empire, called by the people Coricancha, the 
Place of Gold. And well it deserved its name, for, 

[174] 




Old Stone Model of Sachsahuamdn 



- ■■^H 




CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

according to all accounts, its walls were a perfect 
mine of the precious metal. Mortised into the great 
stones of its exterior walls, a frieze of gold, "of a 
palm and a half" in width, encircled the entire edi- 
fice. The interior was ablaze, as befitted a temple 
dedicated to the glory of light. 

In the centre of the western wall a giant sun, repre- 
sented by a human countenance from which rays of 
light sprang in various directions, glowed in all the 
splendour of gold and jewels. The great eastern por- 
tal was placed directly opposite and arranged so that 
the sun, with its first ray, gilded this golden effigy 
that thus threw off a strange effulgence. The walls 
and ceiling were incrusted with gold and the mum- 
mies of all the Incas, dressed as on occasions of state, 
with their coyas, or queens, sat about upon golden 
thrones. 

Adjoining this main temple lesser shrines were 
arranged. In that dedicated to the moon, for exam- 
ple, all was of silver, a silvery moon replacing the 
golden sun. These buildings were each set in ex- 
tensive gardens, whose flowers and plants and ani- 
mals were of gold and silver, simulating with real 
skill the products of nature. 

[175] 




rill Ylj-t-i- i "it n, 



7_J~L 






"i.&ftwjr. 




^4p se of Santo Domingo Built upon the Temple of the Sun 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

Let him who doubts these tales remember that 
gold in the eyes of the Peruvian Indian of that day 
had no monetary value whatever, that money did not 
exist — that gold, in the popular parlance, was "the 
tears wept by the sun" and that all of it found in the 
rich mines of Peru, the real Eldorado of the New 
World during the Spanish colonial period, was sent 
either to the Inca or to his temples. Atahualpa, for 
his ransom, almost filled with golden vessels a room 
thirty-three feet by twenty, representing a value in 
our money of some seventeen million dollars. What 
a sum in those days before the discovery of the great 
gold mines of modern times! 

Dr. Caparo Mufiiz, who possesses a remarkable 
collection of Inca antiquities, showed me a curious 
stone that he had unearthed on a farm some twelve 
leagues from Cuzco, at a place called Yayamarca, the 
Place of the Lord. It is carved to represent a ground- 
plan of the Temple of the Sun, and so interested me 
that I made a drawing of it, which I here present. It 
corresponds quite perfectly with the remains of the 
sanctuary that still exist. 

These consist of important portions of its circular 
walls and a number of those singular niches that 

[177] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

taper in toward the top like those of the edifices of 
Egypt. Extensive interior walls of perfect masonry 
are incorporated in the present church and convent 




Itica Stone Representing a Plan of the Temple of the Sun 

of Santo Domingo that the conquerors built immedi- 
ately over the pagan temple. 

I visited this old church with the rector of the uni- 
versity, who was kindness itself to us during our stay, 
and Padre Vasquez, the amiable prior of the monas- 
tery, took us about in person. Strangely enough, it 
was the first time that these two men had met, for 
the prior was comparatively a new-comer to Cuzco, 
so I benefited by the enthusiasm of their first visit 
together. 

[178] 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

We inspected in turn the cloister courts, the church, 
and all the intricate by-ways of its corridors and 
stairways. The Christian temple is doubtless in- 
teresting, but the walls that it stands upon and that 
crop out here and there in its fabric were the subject 
of our wonder. Theirs is the most perfect masonry 
of any of the Inca ruins that I saw. These are the 
massive smooth-faced stones that Sarmiento saw and 
commended, whose joints are so nicely wrought 
that they can scarcely be detected. How a nation, 
without iron or steel — with only champi, a mixture 
of copper and tin — to aid them, could have produced 
such finish will always be a matter of wonder. They 
certainly possessed some secret for cutting stone that 
we do not know to-day. 

Near this Church of Saint Dominic stands the con- 
vent of the nuns of Santa Catalina, built upon the 
ruins of what was, in the time of the Incas, the House 
of the Virgins of the Sun, a huge structure some eight 
hundred feet in length. These girls, chosen by the 
provincial governors from among the most beautiful 
in the kingdom, tended the sacred fire in the temples, 
their duties being curiously analogous to those of the 
Roman vestal virgins. Their guardians, the mama- 

[179] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

cunas, taught them weaving and spinning, and from 
among them were selected the Inca's many concu- 
bines. Once in a while one of them was chosen for 
sacrifice, but this was a very rare occurrence, as the 
religion of the Incas only permitted of human sacri- 
fice on occasion of exceptional importance, thereby 
differing materially from the rites of other American 
races — the wholesale slaughters of the Aztecs, for 
example. 

Soon after the conquest the Spaniards built three 
great churches in Cuzco, three churches worthy of a 
European capital. Unlike the churches of Lima, 
these happily have escaped remodelling. 

Two of them, the cathedral and the Compania, 
face upon the main plaza, the heart of the city; the 
third, La Merced, is but a step away. All three are 
in the style of the Spanish Renaissance, patterned, 
let us say, from such a church as San Lorenzo of the 
Escurial. 

The interior of the Compania is the handsomest of 
the three. Its pillars, with their simple capitals, and 
its well-designed architrave support wide-spreading 
stone arches and broad vaults of brick. The great 
retablo that occupies its entire east end, though de- 

[ 180 ] 



-J 



F 








-'- t.? s -^oTVo . C.,c >«« 



Plaza and Church of the Compaiifa, Cuzco 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

fective in general design, with its bulky columns and 
broken pediments, is filled with such fine detail — 
saints and angels, paintings and niches, rising tier 
above tier upon its golden cornices — that you forget 
the one in the admiration of the other. Its gilding, 
too — as, for the matter of that, the gilding in all these 
Peruvian churches — is wonderful, done with the rich, 
pure metal that was found in such comparative 
abundance at the time of the conquest. And the 
dust of centuries combined with the finger of time 
has imparted to this gold, too gaudy perhaps in its 
pristine glory, a patina of rare mellowness with a 
depth and glint in the shadow that I have never seen 
equalled elsewhere. 

The gold of the pulpit is perhaps the most beauti- 
ful of all — in fact, the pulpit itself is a gem, remark- 
able alike for the beauty of its design and its exquisite 
workmanship, to my mind a far finer work of art than 
the more famous one at San Bias, which, though a 
marvel indeed of the wood-carver's art, is too ornate 
and too charged with intricate detail to merit its 
high repute. 

Several of the original polychrome figures of saints 
still remain in the niches of the south transept, and 

[182] 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

above them a long fresco unrolls itself across the big 
lunette, a queer procession of black-robed monks, 
which, though of a much later period, has a Giot- 
tesque quality in the simplicity of its silhouettes and 
backgrounds. 

Near the main portal are other notable pictures, 
significant perhaps more by reason of their subjects 
than for their technique. One is of distinct historic 
interest, depicting the marriage of Don Martin de 
Loyola to Da. Beatris Nusta, Princesa del Peru, a 
descendant of the royal Incas. A strange bird is 
perched upon the bride's wrist, and she wears a cape 
and a gown elaborately embroidered with the nucchu, 
the favourite flower of the Incas. Sairitupa and 
Tupa Amaru, royal personages in rich Inca dress, sit 
upon thrones to the left, while the relatives of the 
groom are grouped at the right in magnificent Span- 
ish court costumes, each detail of which is worked out 
with the utmost faithfulness. 

Adjoining this picture hangs a queer painting of 
very large dimensions depicting a priest who, with 
open book, the "Exercicia Spiritualia," is confound- 
ing infidels, shown under the guise of Turks whose 
turbans bear the legends: Luthero, Calvino, Melan- 

[183] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

ton, Wiclete, Ecolampadio. I have transcribed the 
spelling letter by letter. 

Upon our second visit to this church during Holy 
Week, the Indians were decorating the shrines for 
Easter, dressing Santiago in bright colours and hang- 
ing flags about his niche; placing above the altars 
huge fan-shaped ornaments made of bits of mirror, 
pieces of tinsel, and squares and lozenges of lurid 
colours combined with truly barbaric effect, and 
placing before these, little rows of monks and figures 
cut out of paper and dishes filled with grains and 
fruits — all of which looked strange indeed in a Chris- 
tian temple and made us remember that the Indian 
of to-day has not yet lost all of his pagan practices, 
a fact that was brought back to us again and again 
as the week progressed toward Easter. 

The Church of the Order of Mercy, La Merced, in 
which the bones of Almagro and Gonzalo Pizarro are 
said to rest, is chiefly remarkable for its cloisters, 
whose massive stone arcades and monumental stair- 
cases have for centuries withstood the storms of 
these altitudes and are perhaps the handsomest in 
Peru, though not as picturesque as some of those in 
Lima. 

[ 184 ] 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

One morning I visited the Franciscan convent. 
The rector, who again accompanied me, asked for 

Father M , who proved to be a sympathetic 

Scotchman, artistic to the tips of his long, lean fingers, 
a lover of music, accompanying the organ with his 
violin— a mystic and a dreamer, who had forsaken 
the business life of Lima in disgust and fled to the 
quiet of this mountain cloister. He kindly guided us 
about, showing us the strange water-fowl of the 
country gathered in a circular basin in one of the 
courts, and the lovely Spanish tiles, piled in a mass 
in an outhouse, that had once been ruthlessly 
stripped from the walls by some iconoclastic prior, 
presenting me with two of the best he could find, and 
in the sacristy he displayed the vestments of the 
church — some of old Spanish brocade, others rich in 
gold and jewels quite newly made by the nuns of 
Santa Catalina who dwell in the House of the Virgins 
of the Sun. 

So the days passed by. 

Sometimes we explored the by-ways of the city, 
sketching in the steep, picturesque streets that climb 
the hills; again we poked about the gaudy Indian 
shops that line the arcades of the plaza with their 

[185] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

vivid wares; sometimes we loitered about the mar- 
ket or looked for Spanish shawls and frames and laces 
in the shops and houses. 

We remained snugly in our car during all our stay, 
with good Prudenzio to cook for us and faithful Juan 
to serve us, the hotels of the town offering but a 
poor alternative for the comfort of this abode out 
in the broad fields just beyond the smells and dirt 
of the town. But let me say it here — this is the only 
Peruvian city we visited that offended us in this 
way, the other places being far cleaner and better 
kept than most of the small towns of Italy or Spain. 

The Easter services did not prove remarkable, re- 
sembling in all their essentials those we had seen in 
Mediterranean countries, except for one important 
ceremony — that of Holy Thursday. 

The interior of the cathedral at Cuzco is arranged 
after the peculiar fashion of some Spanish churches, 
with its choir occupying a large space in the central 
nave. Richly wrought gates enclose it and a broad 
flight of carpeted steps lead from it to the massive 
silver high altar. This arrangement, though well 
adapted for processionals, blocks the view of most of 
the congregation. 

[186] 




•£:<z .Vw.A; 



Line the Arcades of the Plaza with Their Gaudy Wares 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

On this particular morning the bishop himself was 
officiating. The scene was imposing. As you stood 
in the centre of the nave you looked in one direction 
toward the richly carved silleria, or stalls of the 
choir, occupied by the clergy in purple and black. 
Just in front of the gilded gates that shut it in, the 
prefect and all the civil authorities in full uniform, 
together with the superior officers of the garrison, 
sat in red- velvet arm-chairs. In the other direction 
you saw the high altar raised upon its lofty platform 
and backed by a magnificent retablo, carved and 
gilded, that reaches to the arches overhead. Priests 
moved about, half hidden in clouds of incense, choir- 
boys and assistants walked in procession between 
rows of people kneeling or sitting upon the llama- 
wool carpets of the nave, among them Spanish 
women in black rebosos, Indians in ponchos, and 
cholos in nondescript garments, half Indian, half 
European. 

Presently all the assistants — priests, dignitaries, 
and congregation — moved in slow procession toward 
a large chapel that adjoins the cathedral, the Cora- 
zon, or Sacred Heart. 

This had been dressed as for a great festival. 

[188] 




The Steep, Picturesque Streets that Climb the Hills 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

Upon the massive silver high altar, with its silver 
tabernacle, handsome candelabra of the same metal 
had been placed. The reading-desk and the hanging 
lamps were also of silver, and in the nave itself stood 
many of the two hundred and eighty silver pieces 
given by the members of the Order of Santiago, such 
as huge blandones, or candlesticks, two metres in 
height, censers, in the form of tables, of the same 
metal — in fact, a most extraordinary mass of silver. 

Against this shimmering background a peculiar 
ceremony was enacted, at the end of which the pre- 
fect knelt before the bishop, who hung about his 
neck a golden key, the key of the tomb, of which the 
prefect thus became the custodian until Easter. 

In the late afternoon and evening the bishop, with 
his clergy, 'visited all the churches of the city one 
after -the other. Most of the people did likewise. 
Every church and chapel was alight with thousands 
of twinkling candles, and hung with Easter decora- 
tions — not blooms such as we use, but great curtains 
of blue studded with silver stars, yards of coloured 
cheese-cloth, and tawdry paper flowers. 

We went last to La Merced and remained there 
until after dark watching the people and the strange 

[190] 



CUZCO, THE INCA CAPITAL 

types. When we emerged night had closed in. All 
along the Calle de la Merced, against the very walls 
of the church, booths had sprung up, lit by splutter- 
ing, smoky lanterns that cast weird lights and heavy 
shadows upon venders and purchasers alike, as they 
bargained over tables covered with white-lace cloths. 
Upon these tables lay the strangest-looking sweet- 
meats prepared ready for the Easter holidays: can- 
died apples, browned and stuck upon sticks; jellied 
fruits and sugary cookies; sticky candies; and — a 
specialty these — swans or doves done in almond 
paste and laid upon plates surrounded by candied 
vegetables. 

The bishop and his suite issued from the church 
door, his long purple train carried by acolytes, and 
slowly and with dignity he took his way down the 
street toward his palace in the darkness. Every street 
that we looked down ended in the night; we, too, 
made our way toward the city gate and the open 
fields under the stars. 



[191] 



LAKE TITICACA 



LAKE TITICACA 

A LL the afternoon, upon our return journey from 
f--\ Cuzco, we had been speeding through the 
-*■ ^ dreary plains of the Kollasuyu, or country 
of the Collao, the great basin that slopes gently down- 
ward from the mountains on every hand to form the 
cup that holds the waters of Titicaca. Even at this 
great altitude (for we were more than twelve thou- 
sand feet above the sea) flamingoes stood rosy in the 
pools and yellow daisies carpeted the tracks. As 
we approached the lake, the clouds were gathering, 
and by the time Juliaca's church gleamed white 
against its background hills, giant cumuli were piling 
into the heavens threatening a downpour at any 
moment. 

Darkness was creeping on. The express from the 
coast came snorting into the station; our car was 

[195] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

switched on to its rear end, and again we started off 
in the night. 

In about an hour we made the lights of Puno and 









l 




<- =B 



Juliaca 



in a few moments drew up alongside the dock. 
The lake superintendent came into our coach, fol- 
lowed by three Indians, who took up our luggage. 
He also brought with him the captain of the Coya, 

[196] 



LAKE TITICACA 

the steamer that was to take us over to Guaqui. At 
no other spot upon this globe can you have a like 
experience: an all-night voyage on a 700-ton steamer 
(the Inca, her mate, is 900-ton register) across a 
great body of water hung two miles or more above 
the sea. 

We watched the preparations for departure with 
lively interest. Directly below us, upon the forward 
deck, among half-breeds and Indians and crates 
marked pavos and patos (ducks and chickens, for the 
La Paz market), the Bolivian mails lay piled. What 
distant pictures their well-worn sacks evoked — the 
red-and-yellow bags that carry the Correos de Espana 
from Madrid and Barcelona mingled with those 
barred with blue that contained our own American 
mails, and with other stout canvases marked "Postes 
de France" or "London to La Paz via Mollendo." 

From the bridge overhead our British captain gave 
his orders to cast off the lines. The steamer swung 
about and we started out into the night. The moon, 
hitherto hidden in filmy clouds, now appeared 
dramatically to light our pathway and sparkle upon 
the rippling water. The searchlight flashed from 
side to side, bringing out in turn the red buoys that 

[197] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

mark the channel, or the tufts of grass and reeds 
that clothe the long spits running out into the 

lake. 

Thus we cautiously felt our way until the channel 
widened, the searchlight went out, and the quickened 
thud of the propeller told us we were in open water. 

The hills, indigo in their blue-blackness, began to 
recede and gradually left us alone. The clouds drew 
aside their curtains and the stars — so close, so bright, 
so numberless in this rarefied air — seemed to twinkle 
as they had never twinkled before. And, as my eye 
singled out Venus, I thought of the Incas and their 
reverence for the stars, especially "Chasca," this 
star of the "long and curling locks," that they hon- 
oured as the special page of the sun, sometimes pre- 
ceding, then again following, its master. 

We could scarcely make up our mind to go below, 
yet the night air was chill, and our cabin snug — a 
spacious saloon with three beds and an extra couch, 
a Vespagnole, for a servant in the toilet-room. 

Late in the night we heard the rain pattering on 
the deck above us, and in the morning, when we 
awoke at daybreak, it was still showering. No land 
was in sight, only the grey waters of the lake stretch- 

[198] 



LAKE TITICACA 

ing off to meet the low-lying clouds. But with sun- 
rise the mists lifted, gathered themselves together, 
and slowly disclosed, along the water's edge, strips 
of land to the right — the faint forms of islands, the 
sacred islands of the lake, Titicaca or Inti-Karka, 
dedicated to the sun, and Coati, sacred to the moon, 
in the very spot where the founders of the Inca 
Empire, Manco Capac and his sister-wife, according 
to legend, rose from the waters of the lake to elevate 
humanity from its barbarism. 

Upon Coati, the ruins of the convent of the Virgins 
of the Sun and the Moon still exist in good presei- 
vation, but under ordinary circumstances they are 
difficult of access, the regular steamers making no 
stops at the islands. 

As our bow silently ploughed its way through the 
still waters, the shores drew nearer, the long penin- 
sula of Copacabana, a revered pilgrim shrine of the 
Indians, almost blocking the passage to the south 
end of the lake. We entered the Straits of Tiquino, 
whose stony hillsides, terraced with vineyards, re- 
minded us of the Rhine country. Little groups of 
thatched mud huts and pottery-roofed houses, hum- 
ble homes of these primitive lacustrian peoples, lay 

[199] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

scattered in the fields or huddled about a pointed 
belfry. 

As we proceeded through the narrows, the clouds 
began to break and the sun to take possession of this, 
his own special lake. And what a glory he made of it ! 
By the time we had emerged from the straits, Titi- 
caca's waters, hitherto grey, sparkled with a million 
diamonds and, as the patches of bright sky grew 
larger, caught azure reflections until they stretched 
blue, pure and radiant, off to the far-distant hills. 

Once or twice we passed a balsa, gliding quietly 
before the morning breeze — a frail boat of reeds, like 
those we had seen on the coast, though here upon 
Titicaca even their sails are made of reeds, like 
those of the children of Pharaoh. 

The shore-lines, broken, complicated with numer- 
ous islands and inlets, headlands and terraced hills, 
presented every variety of colour as the fleecy cloud- 
shadows mottled their surfaces, rosy or grey, purple 
or violet, and in the distance the indigo mountains 
of the Royal Cordillera reflected themselves in the 
still waters. Despite the rarity and purity of this 
wonderful air, Sorata, king of peaks, remained in- 
visible that morning, hiding his head in a wreath of 

[200] 




A Balsa on Lake Tilicaca 



LAKE TITICACA 

clouds, but upon our return journey he showed his 
elusive summit far away to the eastward, the third 
highest peak upon the globe. 

The sky was an unbroken vault of blue when we 
reached Guaqui. A battalion of infantry, out for 
manoeuvres, was lounging upon the wharf, and their 
neat uniforms, on the German pattern, reminded us 
that we had left Peru and crossed the border to 
Bolivia. 



[201] 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 

A HANDSOME young Englishman came 
aboard to meet us, the superintendent of 
the railway. The same mighty arm that 
had smoothed our journey thus far had reached even 
across the lake, and, by its ministration, a special 
car was waiting to take us on to La Paz. It had 
further been kindly arranged that an engine should 
take this car immediately to Tiahuanaco, leaving it 
there until the late afternoon passenger picked it up. 
The road lay across a bleak pampa of the Collao. 
At the end of half an hour or so we stopped at an 
isolated station. 

Few traces of the famous ruins of Tiahuanaco ap- 
pear at first sight, but upon walking about one is 
amazed at their great extent. Baffling indeed they 
remain. Even the most vivid effort of the imagina- 
tion can do little toward reconstructing them. And 

[205] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

if a learned man like Humboldt dare not venture to 
fathom their mysteries, and such a ripened traveller 




Ruins of Tiahuanaco 

as Squier calls them the "most enigmatical upon the 
continent," what guess may a mere searcher for the 
picturesque dare hazard? Old they are certainly, 
of a date far preceding the Inca period; but what 

[206] 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 

they were, where and by whom quarried, and how 
transported to their present situation — one monolith 
is estimated to weigh seven hundred tons — all these 
are matters of pure conjecture. 

Did a member of some Toltec band that wandered 
southward carve the curious figure that I have 
sketched, so strangely like those in Central America, 
or was the stone-cutter a native of these Andean 
table-lands, some artisan working out his own idea 
of art expression? An Aymara tradition declares 
that these sculptured images are the original inhabit- 
ants turned to stone for their wickedness by Tunupa, 
who was unable to reform them. The Aymaras, 
who, apparently, are oldest of the American peoples, 
have a curious account of the creation of the world. 
It asserts that, in the beginning, Khunu, arch- 
enemy of man and cause of all his troubles, froze 
the earth and by continued drought converted fer- 
tile plains into sterile deserts, depriving man of all 
that was necessary to his existence and reducing him 
to the level of the lower animals. But Pachacamac, 
creator of the world, supreme spirit and regulator of 
the universe, took pity upon the unfortunate human 
beings, and restored all that Khunu had destroyed. 

[207] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

Khunu's anger, however, was again unchained, and 
he sent a deluge and plunged the earth into utter 
darkness. 

The prayers of the people were heeded and an- 
swered by Inti, the sun-god, who rose from Titicaca, 
where his shrine stood, to bathe the earth with 
warmth and light. His efforts were ably seconded by 
Ticcihuiracocha, who came among mankind to help 
them, performing miracles as he went, smoothing 
down the mountains, lifting up the deep abysses, 
causing crystal waters to gush from the rocks and, 
above all, instilling into the human heart sentiments 
of piety, order, and industry. Realising that gold 
and silver were the fount of all corruption, he hid 
them in the depths of the most inaccessible regions 
or in the flanks of lofty mountains, and by his efforts 
and those of Tunupa, who followed him, mankind 
was restored to happiness and progress. 

Such is the Aymaras' crude account of the crea- 
tion — a sort of geological allegory, Khunu represent- 
ing the Glacial period, Pachacamac the restoring 
forces of nature, and Ticcihuiracocha the changes of 
the Tertiary period. 

We spent some hours wondering at the mighty 

[208] 




Stone Image, Tiahuanaco 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

stones fashioned by these Indians; at their well-cut 
angles, their hints of sculpture and ornament; the 
nicety of their joints; the size of their megaliths, 
and the strange, crude carvings in the museum. One 
quadrangular building would seem by its extent to 
have been a royal residence; there is a flight of mono- 
lithic steps, and there are underground passages, 
well-preserved doorways, and queer upright stones 
that resemble Alaskan totem poles. We enjoyed, 
too, a walk through the little modern town, some of 
whose houses are built of these same pre-Inca stones, 
and whose church portal is flanked by curious heads 
unearthed in the ruins. 

The ride on to La Paz continues across a bleak 
level plateau. Half-wild cattle and groups of mules 
stampede at the train's approach. Indian women, 
dressed in crude colours, work in the fields of quinoa, 
the only grain that grows upon these wind-swept 
punas. Aymaras in black or red ponchos, silent, 
aloof, wait at the stations. 

If the Quichua Indian is sad, the Aymara is even 
sadder still, a look of concentrated melancholy rest- 
ing ever upon his features. Unsocial, gloomy, whole 
families live together with scarcely, it would seem, 

[210] 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 

a spoken word or a look of affection exchanged be- 
tween them. 

By many this habitual sadness is attributed to 
their excessive use of coca. And certainly no Aymara 
is ever seen without his chuspa or bag that contains 
this, his favourite drug, the delight, the support, and 
to some extent the necessity, of his life. I found it 
interesting to watch an Indian prepare to chew. 
First he makes himself as comfortable as possible, 
for it seems that, as in the case of opium, quiet and 
repose are essential to the full enjoyment of the drug. 
Then he takes his chuspa between his knees, and 
slowly, one by one, extracts the pale-green leaves, 
rolling them carefully to form a ball, which he chews 
until it ceases to emit its juice. Three or four times 
a day he repeats this operation, the only pleasure of 
his otherwise monotonous existence. 

The effects of coca are varied. Taken to excess it 
is a terrible vice. Taken in moderation it imparts 
strange powers of endurance. For example, because 
of its anaesthetic effect upon the mucous membrane 
of the stomach, it deadens the pangs of hunger to 
such an extent that Indians under its influence have 
been known to work for three days without food or 

[2111 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

other nourishment of any kind. It seems also to 
lessen the fatigue of their long journeys afoot and 
give them strength to combat the effects of high 
altitudes. 

Though known to Europeans but recently, the 
properties of the coca leaf, from which we make 
cocaine, have long been appreciated by the Andean 
Indians. To the Incas it was sacred, mystic. The 
priests chewed it during the religious ceremonies; 
it was burnt like incense before the shrines of the 
gods, and handfuls of it were thrown during sacrifice. 
Its leaves were put into the mouths of the dead to 
insure their favourable reception in the next world, 
a custom that persists even to-day. And in the 
mines the Indian workmen still throw it upon the 
veins of ore, believing it to soften the metal and 
render it easier to work. 

The sun's intensity had gathered up the clouds 
once more, and off to the westward long curtains of 
rain obscured the distance. At Viacha a village 
fete was in progress. A band was playing over by 
the public-house, the church was dressed with flags 
and green boughs, and about the station a large 
crowd was assembled. A train, bound southward for 

[212] 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 

Oruro and the long dreary journey down to Anto- 
f agasta, the only other means of communication be- 
tween La Paz and the coast, stood on the track next 
us. Two of its coaches were filled with soldiers in 
charge of German officers, whose Teuton faces and 
familiar grey uniforms and cloaks looked strangely 
out of place in these mountain solitudes. 

As we left the station the great storm-clouds that 
had been gathering about the mountains shifted a 
little, drifting just enough to disclose the icy summits 
and snowy peaks of two of America's greatest moun- 
tains, Illimani and Huayna Potosi. So sudden was 
their apparition, so amazing the grandeur of their 
structure, so extensive their wildernesses of snow, that 
our eyes never left them as we continued to approach 
them, appearing first on one side of the train, then 
upon the other. Their slopes below the snow-line 
were of an intense blackish blue that formed a dense, 
rich background to the landscape, and, to add the 
necessary touch to the foreground, at one point two 
cholos on light-brown mules with white feet came 
galloping along wrapped in magenta ponchos with 
yellow borders — a scheme of colour daring yet stun- 
ning and worthy of Zuloaga's brush. 

[213] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

We knew that now we must be approaching La 
Paz, yet no hint of a city lay in the stony fields of 
this level plateau, stretching apparently unbroken 
to the Royal Cordillera upon the one hand and to 
an unlimited distance upon the other. Long trains 
of little donkeys, heavily laden, watched by their 
arrieros, and great majadas of llamas, each with its 
hundred-pound load, were coming from every direc- 
tion across the plains, and all were trending toward 
a certain focal point ahead of us. But where could 
the city be? 

The train whistled as it rounded a long curve, and 
suddenly, without warning, at the side of the track 
a great chasm opened, coming with such abruptness, 
so unexpectedly, that, breathless, we grasped some 
firm object for support. 

At its far extremity Illimani, lightly wreathed with 
clouds, raised its glorious summit, gleaming in all 
the splendour of its dazzling snow-fields. To the left 
Huayna Potosi spread its glittering peaks and, cut 
into the flanks of these two giants of the Andes, 
seamed and scarred by glacial torrents, deeply 
eroded, mined by cataracts and rivers, this profound 
valley has been excavated by the primeval forces of 

[214] 




A Llama Train on the Bolivian Highlands 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 

nature. At its bottom, far below us, fifteen hundred 
feet or more, lay the city of Our Lady of Peace, La 
Paz, from whose slate roofs and towers a pale-blue 
vapour seemed to emanate as if it were offering in- 
cense at the shrine of some great god. And fittingly, 
for were not these two mountains, Illimani and 
Huayna Potosi, the Indian's Olympus, the abode of 
his chief deities! 

Along the precipitous walls of this abyss, white 
fillets of road cut zig-zags and loops, along which we 
could make out the donkey- trains and llamas with 
their horsemen and drivers crawling slowly down- 
ward like strings of ants. 

Our steam-driven engine was now changed to one 
run by electricity, and our train plunged over the 
brink. The upper plains vanished. Steep walls 
gradually rose about us. The houses of the city at 
each turn lifted themselves nearer, and in twenty min- 
utes we were at the station of the Bolivian capital. 

Viewed from the rim at the Alto, La Paz looks 
flat. Upon closer acquaintance, however, it proves 
to be one of the hilliest cities that you can find, cling- 
ing as it does to the slopes upon both banks of the 
Chuquiapu, the river or rather the torrent that tears 

[215 1 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

through the bottom of the valley. Its steep streets 
plunge down one hill only to ascend another, and in 
this altitude you constantly find yourselves pausing 
for breath. But the bright colours and gay archi- 
tecture of the houses, the rather modern aspect of 
the clean, well-paved thoroughfares, make the city 
attractive to a degree, though it lacks the fine monu- 
ments and relics of the past that one finds in the 
Peruvian cities. 

By this I do not mean to imply that there are no 
old palaces or churches. As a matter of fact, there 
are important buildings several centuries old, for La 
Paz was founded away back in 1549, and called "The 
City of Peace," to commemorate the reconciliation 
between Almagro and Gonzalo Pizarro. How any 
man had the courage to select this site is quite be- 
yond one's powers of comprehension, yet the wisdom 
of the choice is apparent, protected as the city is by 
the walls of its great chasm against the bitter winds 
and storms that sweep this mountain world. 

The principal hotel, installed in an extensive old 
palace surrounding two fine stone courts, overlooks 
one corner of the Plaza Mayor that forms the heart 
of the city, the centre of its activities. It is planted 

[216] 




La Paz from the Alto 














X 



Streets Plunge Down One Hill Only to Ascend Another 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

with pretty flower-beds and trees, semi-tropical in 
character, and decorated with a central monument. 
Fronting upon it are the handsome government 
buildings, a fresh new cafe and club, the unfinished 
cathedral, begun when the mines of Potosi were at 
the height of their activity, and the President's Pal- 
ace, where a group of soldiers mount guard in smart 
uniforms and bright steel helmets. In it, too, stand 
the carriages, open vehicles, each drawn by four 
horses, which fact will give you some idea of the 
steepness of the streets. Few carts are ever seen, 
but pack-trains pass one constantly. Sometimes 
these are composed of big mules, laden with tin and 
ore from the great deposits of Huayna Potosi, headed 
by a bell-horse with red head-dress and gay pom- 
pons, and followed by the arrieros, well mounted, 
watchful, shouting to their beasts, now in terms of 
endearment, then again in curses. Next, perhaps, 
will come a flock of llamas, loaded with ice from the 
Sierra, the cold water trickling over their shaggy 
coats, or a long string of sure-footed donkeys carry- 
ing wood or fresh wheat from the fields, or dried 
sheep from the mountains, or loads of oil, two dozen 
bottles on either side. 

[218] 




_ — £ZXxjsV-i'&Z£z+f,~L. ._ 



/ ' 






Old Courtyard, La Paz 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

Sometimes, even, these pack-trains consist of men 
— also true beasts of burden — carrying incredible 
loads. I saw, for instance, a family moving, every 
household article — beds, tables, wardrobes, lounges 
— carried on human backs up the steep streets, twelve 
thousand feet above the sea! Even pianos are thus 
moved, slung on rawhide ropes between six bearers. 
And again one asks one's self, is it the coca that gives 
them the heart to do such work? 

You may see the Indian life down at the market, 
which, oddly enough, reminded us in several ways 
of the souks of Tunis with its pale-green colonnades, 
through which glints of dazzling sunshine filtered; 
its stalls with their venders squatting cross-legged 
upon them, even the type of these bejewelled vend- 
ers themselves, cholo women for the most part. 

Of all the types of La Paz, these stout cholitas are 
the most characteristic. Because of the decrease of 
the Indian race and the apathy of the Spanish whites, 
who constitute only one-eighth of the entire popu- 
lation of the country, the future of Bolivia rests 
largely upon these half-breeds, who, cunning and 
shrewd at a bargain, have amassed much wealth. 

Their women afford the evidence of this pros- 

[220] 




Group at the Market, La Paz 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 

perity. Often distinctly handsome, their clothing is 
spotless. Upon their heads they wear quaint little 
felt hats stiffened and chalked as white as snow. 
Their dress, usually of some rich material, is covered, 
when on the street, by a great shawl whose long 
silken fringes sweep about their ankles, and whose 
folds are held in place by a handsome pin of gold, 
usually set with baroque pearls or emeralds, from 
which dangles a jointed fish, also of gold, with pearls 
or emeralds for eyes. Their long ear-rings match 
this pin and are also of gold and precious stones. 

When they bend over to bargain with the seated 
women, they disclose their canary -coloured, high- 
heeled shoes, ornamented with tassels, and a few 
inches of tight-drawn creamy stocking veiled by the 
well-starched laces of innumerable petticoats that 
give body to their voluminous skirts. 

Petticoats seem to be the great luxury of the native 
women of all classes. Even the poor Indians wear 
a dozen. When a new skirt is needed it is added on 
the outside, those underneath remaining just as 
before. As they choose only the brightest colours, 
the effect of these multi-coloured garments worn one 
above the other is often startling indeed. 

[221] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

On Sunday mornings the market spills over into 
all the adjoining streets, along whose curbstones the 
Indian women squat with their wares spread out 
upon the ground before them. And what a debauch 
of colour they make, brilliant as any tulip-beds in 
Holland! Red, green, magenta, purple, blue, crim- 
son — all the colours of a post-impressionist — their 
balloon-like skirts go ambling along. No German 
aniline dye is too strong for them. 

And through this gaudy throng the creamy spots 
of the cholo women and the black mantas of the 
Spanish ladies, who understand the distinction of 
their sombre attire, strike the necessary accents. 

Down by San Francisco — a handsome church of 
the early eighteenth century, with a remarkable nave 
and vaulting — is another market where the Indians 
buy their clothes and the homespun cloths for the 
bags and saddle-blankets of their animals. Little 
stalls, where women sell laces and bits of jewelry 
and sandals worked with velvet applique, stand 
wedged between the buttresses of the church, and 
along the Calle del Mercado near by are the shops, 
gay with colour, where you may purchase bright 
ponchos and pointed caps knitted in intricate de- 

[222] 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 

signs. In them, too, you may often see men from 
the Yungas, the rich tropical valley that lies below 
La Paz, and the principal seat of its coca cultivation 
— youths whose long hair, tied in queues, falls about 
their shoulders, and whose gay-striped ponchos con- 
ceal all else but their sturdy, bronzed legs bared to 
the knees. 

If you wish to see the Spanish life you must go, 
some afternoon, across the bridge to the Alameda, 
where the band plays two or three times each week, 
and where the people promenade under the eucalypti 
along a broad avenue bordered by the new villas 
owned by the wealthier citizens of La Paz and by 
the members of the diplomatic corps. To judge 
from one or two we visited, these homes possess 
every modern comfort, and judging from the con- 
versation that we heard within them, their residents 
indulge in most of the social pastimes that we enjoy 
— teas, theatre parties, riding clubs, and tennis clubs, 
though the high altitude is rather against all out- 
door sports. 

As soon as you leave the streets of the city, in any 
direction, you are at once confronted with the savage 
aspect of the country that surrounds it. Forming the 

[223] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 



continuation of each steep thoroughfare, as it were, 
rise the cliffs and pinnacles, coloured by mineral ores, 
^r' of this forbidding valley. 

Having viewed it from 
above at the Alto, it is well 
to see it from below by 
walking down to Obrajes, 
where the Chuquiapu thun- 
ders along in its mad run 
to the sea, mining its way 
deeper and ever deeper into 
its stony bed. There is a 
well-founded theory, I be- 
lieve, that this valley of La 
Paz was at one time the bed 
of the great river that drained 
Titicaca, whose only outlet 
nowadays is the Desagua- 
dero, that leaves the lake 
near Guaqui, to sink finally 
into Oruro's salty plains. 
And certainly immense vol- 
umes of water must have poured down these gullies, 
and still do for that matter, after the frequent and 

angry rains. 

[224] 




An Aymara Musician 



: '■: - - -. -:■-:• 





In the Obrajes Valley 



A GLIMPSE OF BOLIVIA 

As you descend, the floral life that has been so 
entirely absent upon the high plateaus begins to 
bloom again. Purple lupin and black-eyed susans, 
wild roses and calceolaria, with their beautiful slip- 
per-shaped flowers, mingle with masses of broom 
and geranium, while the heads of tall pampas grasses 
nod along the river-bank. Pepper-trees and willows 
shade the occasional dwellings. 

At the roadside an Indian sits making the pas- 
toral reed-pipes that all the natives play, and the 
syrinx, also of reeds, such as the great god Pan played 
in Arcadia. Llamas and donkey-trains, climbing to 
the capital, stumble up the rocky road. High above 
hangs the Capilla, a chapel, as its name implies, to 
which we climbed another afternoon to enjoy the 
wonderful panorama from a belvedere near by, that 
overhangs a chaos of valleys and mountains, chain 
upon chain, culminating in Illimani's dazzling peak 
that rears its head 21,000 feet above the sea. 

Finally, in our descent, we reached the public 
square at Obrajes, and were just admiring the gardens 
that seemed quite tropical in their exuberance after 
the rugged plants of the upper plains, when a ter- 
rific hail-storm swept upon the valley — thunder, 
lightning, and torrents of rushing water. 

[225] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

In a few moments all the country was awash. We 
took refuge in an inn close by, whence we telephoned 
to a friend in the city to send down a cab. A long 
wait, during which we whiled away the time by 
watching the life of this wayside tavern, finally 
brought us the usual four-horse vehicle, whose 
leather top was filled with hail-stones as big as birds' 
eggs. 

The storm had abated, however, as quickly as it 
had begun, and as we climbed upward in the waning 
light the clouds lifted; the crags and castellated pin- 
nacles grew rosy; a shepherd's lonely flute, as in 
Beethoven's "Pastorale," lifted the plaintive voice 
of its yaravi; the birds resumed their songs, and all 
nature seemed to give thanks for its deliverance from 
the storm. 



[226] 



THE RETURN TO PANAMA 



THE RETURN TO PANAMA 

WE left La Paz in the early afternoon, and 
before sundown were aboard the Inca 
upon the shores of Titicaca. The night 
was perfect. I opened the window and its curtains, 
so that if I awoke I could again behold the wonder- 
ful stars of these high altitudes. 

At the first hint of dawn, I was on deck awaiting 
the sunrise. The sky to the east was burnished 
silver, then turned to gold, as the sun showed its 
gleaming face above the mountains. Once in a 
while Sorata's mighty peak appeared between the 
islands. 

The shore was quite close to the westward and, 
as the sun rose, it gilded the bare hills that form a 
great saucer about Puno until they glowed like 
copper. Reed balsas lay in the shadow among the 

[229] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

rushes, while their fishermen prepared for the morn- 
ing's catch. 

As we came up to the dock at about six o'clock, I 




The Plaza, Puno 



spied our now familiar private car, the same that had 
been our home during all our journey to Cuzco, still 
awaiting us, though we had been absent almost two 
weeks. Faithful Prudenzio was standing upon the 
step, and through the windows of the observation 

[230] 



THE RETURN TO PANAMA 

end I could see Juan putting the last touches to the 
breakfast-table, adorned with fresh roses and car- 
nations. It was like coming home again to find our 
luggage and our various purchases in the state- 
rooms, and to be welcomed by these two good ser- 
vants. 

Shortly after we were speeding along toward the 
coast. 

The mountains that, upon our ascent, had veiled 
their summits in the clouds, now shone resplendent 
in the clear morning air. Oh, that glorious journey 
down, with the Andean giants about us dominated 
by the snow-fields of Coropuna! The icy peaks of 
Chachani and Misti's exquisite silhouette greeted us 
later, and then the green valley of the Chili opened 
below. 

We stopped again for a few days in Arequipa, took 
the fast boat at Mollendo, and twenty -four hours 
later were landing at Callao en route for Lima. 
Here we lingered for a week, refreshing the memories 
of our first visit, and seeing the friends that had been 
so kind to us. 

Then followed six days of quiet aboard the good 
ship Guatemala — six days of lazy dreams, watching 

[231] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

the changing colours of land and sea; the lanchas 
loading and unloading at the different ports; the 
queer birds and the amphibia about the islands — 
dreaming, too, of the treasure-ships of the olden days 
whose tracks we were now following, and of Sir 
Francis Drake, whose long cruise from Magellan 
Straits took him far northward to the California 
coast, our present destination. 

What a sea for the yachtsmen, this calm blue 
Pacific, that, in these equatorial latitudes, so well 
deserves its name! 

Then one morning the Pearl Islands rose in the 
northeast, and an hour or two later we were off the 
quarantine station at Panama. 



[232] 



FROM THE ISTHMUS TO THE 
GOLDEN GATE 



FROM THE ISTHMUS TO THE 
GOLDEN GATE 

I 
IN CENTRAL AMERICAN WATERS 

THE sun was setting behind the palm-fringed 
hills. The fairway of the canal, reflecting 
the rosy tints of the sky, stretched placid 
and opalescent off into the Gulf of Panama. The 
noisy cranes had ceased their creaking; the pas- 
sengers were all aboard. Slowly we backed from 
Balboa's dock, swung about, and took our course 
down the bay. As we passed Taboga Island the 
short twilight of the tropics deepened, and before we 
knew it the shades of night had shut us in. 

So here we were well started upon our twenty- 
three days' voyage to San Francisco. Now twenty- 

[235] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

three days at sea at best is not a pleasant prospect, 
twenty-three days of "wet-ploughing," with noth- 
ing to vary the tedium of the long, inactive hours; 
twenty-three days perhaps of wind and rain and 
heavy weather. But upon this occasion no thoughts 
like these dismayed us, for were we not to put into 
about a dozen different ports, to enjoy long shore 
excursions, and perhaps, best of all, to be sure of a 
calm sea with a bright sky, for the beginning of the 
rainy season was still a month away? 

We started upon a Saturday night. All day Sun- 
day we were in the gulf coasting by low, wooded 
shores to Cape Mala, and that evening the sun set 
apparently upon the wrong side of the ship, owing 
to our continued southerly course. 

On Monday we passed the Island of Monterosa 
lifting high its wooded peak; then the Ladrones, but 
not those so important in the old navigation of the 
Pacific, the half-way house so to speak between 
Mexico and the Orient; then at Burica Point we had 
our first glimpse of the Golfo Dulce. 

In the Pacific south of Panama we had thought 
the sea was calm, for its surface was only now and 
then slightly ruffled by the cool breeze that blows up 

[236] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

the coast. But here in these Central American lati- 
tudes it lay motionless, oily, lazy, its only show of 
life being the long heaves that slowly passed over 
it as if to mark its breathing. I watched a sailor take 
the temperature of the water, and his thermometer 
registered eighty degrees. 

Between Matapalo Head and Sal si Puedes Point 
the coast rose to ranges perhaps two thousand feet 
in height. Deep fringes of cocoanut-palms skirted 
the shore, backed by lovely hills covered with dense 
wood, among whose trees, the captain assured us, 
fine mahogany, rosewood, and cedars are still to be 
found in large quantities. Toward sundown we 
sighted Cano Island, a veritable Robinson Crusoe's 
isle, quite alone upon the deep, yet wooded and ap- 
parently provided with all the necessities of human 
existence. 

All day Tuesday we were off the coast of Nica- 
ragua, in a fine clipping breeze, and at night crossed 
the mouth of the Bay of Fonseca, important commer- 
cially, as Honduras, Nicaragua, and Salvador all 
have frontages upon it. 

On Wednesday morning the land was again very 
near, so close indeed that we could plainly see the 

[237] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

long sandy beaches, the rich foliage of the hills, and 
the lazy breakers of the Pacific swell rolling in the 
logs and driftwood. These were the coves that Gil 




Watching the Lanchas 



Gonzales explored, as virgin to-day as when he, the 
first white man to behold these 

" Seas unsailed and shores unhailed," 

saw them from the deck of his high-pooped galleon. 
Suddenly, as we watched, among the inland mists 
that rose in the warm, moist air, a blue silhouette ap- 
peared, so faint that we could scarcely distinguish its 

[238] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

outline, so high that we could hardly believe our eyes 
— the conical peak of Vicente rising more than seven 
thousand feet above the sea, one of the long suc- 
cessions of volcanoes that bristle along this Central 
American sea. Soon we passed the mouth of the Rio 
Jiboa, that empties into Lake Ilo Pango; then the 
long sierra that separates San Salvador from the 
coast came into view. 

Scarcely a sign of human life had enlivened these 
three days' travel, but now ahead a mole protruded 
into the sea with a white warehouse upon its end. 
This was all that at first sight marked La Libertad, 
at one time Salvador's main port, but now, since the 
opening of the railroad at Acajutla, somewhat aban- 
doned. We went ashore, however, in the agent's 
boat, were hoisted in a chair from it to the dock, and 
spent the afternoon wandering about the village, 
drinking cocoanut milk and nibbling tamarinds in a 
shop; seeing the old church, a wofully poor affair; 
and enjoying the tropical trees and plants. We re- 
turned to the ship in a big lighter laden with coffee, 
were duly hoisted aboard again in a sort of car like 
those used in roller-coasters, and soon were off to 
sea again. 

[239] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

Not for very long, however, for upon the following 
morning we cast anchor off Acajutla. As upon the 
west coast of South America, these Pacific ports are, 
with one or two exceptions, merely open roadsteads 




«■ T « T< >■«.-*. . V\r 



The Mole, La Libertad 

where the steamers lie within a mile or so of shore. 
Passengers, baggage, and freight alike are transferred 
in lighters, the experiences attending embarkation 
and debarkation being sometimes quite thrilling. 
A number of passengers were leaving our steamer 

[240] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

at Acajutla, among them the family of a president of 
Ecuador who had just been ruthlessly murdered in a 
revolution, and whose relatives were seeking asylum 
in Salvador. These people, as well as the secretary 
of the American legation at San Salvador, who was 
also in their party, proposed that we should accom- 
pany them inland as far as Sonsonate, where they 
were to spend the night, proceeding to San Salvador 
upon the morrow. Our captain assured us that we 
could do this, provided we returned by the early 
train next morning. 

So after lunch, four at a time, the whole party — 
stout Spanish ladies all in deepest black, Indian 
servants, attentive and watchful, carrying band- 
boxes, handbags, parrots, and lap-dogs, as well as 
ourselves — all were lowered into a lighter and hoisted 
ashore again at the bodega perched on the end of the 
mole. We found we had time before the train's de- 
parture to look about the village and its great coffee 
warehouses. Then we all enjoyed refreshing bever- 
ages upon the balcony of the port-agent's house 
overlooking the palm-sheltered village, with its bam- 
boo huts and its women peddling fruits, frijoles, and 
starchy-looking puddings. 

[241] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

A little train finally came crawling in, and soon we 
were off upon our trip inland. At first we passed 
through a rich grazing country. The name of the 
second station, Moisant, recalled the intrepid aviator 
who was the first to fly the English Channel. And 
rightly, for here is situated the great beneficio, or 
plantation, operated by his brother, and from which 
he too went forth to lead his adventurous career. 
Adventurous, indeed, is the word, for all the country 
remembers him as a dare-devil, ever in hot water, 
manning a Gatling gun in the square at Sonsonate, 
holding it alone against the revolutionists, or swim- 
ming to sea to plant the Stars and Stripes upon a 
French ship that had gone ashore near Acajutla, thus 
bringing our government into international compli- 
cations. 

He was finally exiled from Salvador, but returned 
in disguise, going directly to see the President. When 
he was admitted, he tore off his false beard and said: 
"Well, here I am back again; what are you going to 
do with me?" To which the President, quite taken 
aback and lost in admiration at his daring, replied: 
" Why, nothing at all, Tom. Come and have a drink." 

The world knows of his career as an aviator — his 

[242] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

spectacular apparition from nowhere, his heroic 
crossing of the Channel to the amazement and dis- 
comfiture of England, and of his sad, untimely death. 
This, his old home, an American-looking house, peace- 
ful, comfortable, always open to the breeze, is set 
under waving cocoanut-palms in the midst of fields 
of sugar-cane. 

The foliage hereabout was particularly handsome. 
Palms and conicaste, with their soaring trunks and 
umbrella-like burst of leafage at the top, mingled with 
superb madre de cacao giants of the forest both in 
height and spread, so called because the cocoa plant 
is sheltered from the ardent sun beneath their spread- 
ing branches, as broad as those of the greatest oaks. 
Cattle grazed in the lowlands and the corn was ripen- 
ing to perfection, irrigated by little ditches. 

In less than an hour we reached Sonsonate. The 
quaint hotel, primitive but decent, called the Blanco 
y Negro, is but a step from the station. They 
showed us a large room opening directly upon the 
street by means of a shuttered door, and upon the 
patio by a similar entrance. There were no windows, 
but we slept in the draught between the doors. The 
spacious dining-room in the court was also open on 

[243] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

every hand to the winds of heaven by reason of large 
unglazed air-spaces that in rainy weather could be 
closed by movable shutters. Upon each table, 
among the usual articles, stood an olive-oil bottle, 
filled with a thick, black mixture, which, on closer 
acquaintance, proved to be the richest extract of 
coffee, a few drops of which at breakfast in a cup of 
milk made strong cafe au lait. 

Sonsonate has but one street of importance. Only 
a few paces from the hotel it crosses a high bridge 
that commands a fine view up and down a deep 
gorge, luxuriantly tropical, where the women stand 
knee-deep in the pools washing their vari-coloured 
garments, and of the handsome blue distant moun- 
tains that shut off the town to the eastward. 

Upon this bridge there is always a strange con- 
course of people and animals: women, straight and 
erect, balancing baskets of fruit, ollas of water, and 
brown earthen bowls of frijoles upon their heads; 
ox-carts rumbling along upon their solid wooden 
wheels and covered with great dried cowhides, and 
once in a while a little tram-car, mule-drawn, that 
seems to meander off to nowhere at all. The pave- 
ment of the street rises and falls in a thousand ruts 

[244] 






Sonsonate 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

and gullies, heaving itself as if a long series of earth- 
quakes had utterly shattered its cobbled surfaces. 

The little shops are kept for the most part by 
Chinamen or Armenians, and one of the latter, when 
I asked for souvenir postal cards to send to friends, 
could only produce views of Jerusalem! In the 
Chinese shops you can find the pretty silken scarfs 
that the women wear, made in China especially for this 
Central American trade, and most becoming they are, 
framing the dark oval faces in their soft silky folds. 

It was at vespers that, toward twilight that after- 
noon, we saw them to their best advantage. The 
church interior, spacious and airy, is painted pink 
and pale water-green, and against this background, 
like bouquets of soft flowers, nodded these scarf- 
covered heads, coral and violet, lavender and pale- 
blue, heliotrope and white. As night came on, the 
women trooped away out under the golden bamboo 
arch that shades the transept door and through the 
plaza, stopping perhaps to buy some bits of food 
from the venders who squatted on the curbstones 
before the great columns of the portico, their earthen 
bowls cooking with a spluttering of oil over open 
fires kindled in the gutter. 

[245] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

There was a concert in the plaza that evening. A 
military band discoursed excellent music from the 
band-stand, while under the lovely flowering trees 
that stained the pavement with their falling blooms, 
the townspeople sat upon blue benches or walked 
around the leafy avenues. Girls, four abreast, arm 
in arm, pale as moonflowers, with their hair, silky 
and well cared for, hanging loosely down their backs, 
swished their starched skirts as they passed; negro 
women, black as night, in scarlet dresses with long 
golden ear-rings dangling about their necks, walked 
quietly behind their mistresses; the blue Prefec- 
tura gleamed ghostly in the moonlight, and even the 
cold, white, classic church, whose great columns swell 
like those of Egypt into lotus-flower capitals, took on 
the warmth and glamour of this southern night, 
making a picture like the scenic setting of some grand 
opera. 



[246] 



II 

GUATEMALA AND ITS CAPITAL 

WE awoke at dawn, took the early train, 
and by ten o'clock were once more 
aboard the ship. That night we crossed 
the boundary to Guatemala and anchored in the 
early morning at its chief Pacific seaport, San Jose. 
Our steamer carried a consignment of steel rails 
destined for a link in the Pan-American Railway. 
These were to be put off at Champerico, the next 
port, a lengthy and tedious operation that, in the 
ground swell, would usually require about two days. 
So we planned to utilise this time in making a trip 
up to Guatemala City. 

This was a Saturday, and according to all calcu- 
lations our steamer could not leave Champerico 
before the following Tuesday morning at the earliest. 
In order to facilitate our departure our captain, who 

[247] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

was kindness and thoughtfulness itself during all 
this cruise, sent us quickly ashore in his gig. We 
found the Pacific Mail agent upon the dock, and he 
too assured us, after some demur, that the trip, as 
we planned it, was feasible. So presently we were 
seated in the train again ascending the hills toward 
the interior of Guatemala. The air was moist and 
big vaporous clouds hung about the distant moun- 
tains. The country through which we passed at 
first resembled the ride to Sonsonate, being chiefly 
through grazing-lands interspersed at times with 
large plantations of sugar-cane or bananas. Natives 
in gay costume leaned from the doorways of palm- 
leaf huts. 

Beyond Escuintla the air grew cooler; the clouds 
lifted to some extent and disclosed richly wooded 
hillsides, well-tilled fields, and beneficios with pink, 
box-like houses surrounded by long white arcades. 
Clear little streams fringed with willows ran merrily 
down to the sea. The views toward the coast were 
lovely as the train rounded curve after curve, always 
mounting to cooler heights. But the great volcano, 
Agua, stubbornly refused to show itself on this our 
upward journey. 

[248] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

At the stations the Indian women met the train to 
peddle their fruits: mangoes and pineapples, chiri- 








C-c :C;7,<s,-T 



Ploughing on Agua 






moyas, alligator pears, and loquats. And a gay pic- 
ture they made with their thick black hair bound 
tight about their heads to form braided crowns, 
plaited with broad ribbons of lilac and green. Their 

[249] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

strong yet delicately moulded arms emerged from 
white chemisettes, enriched with embroidery, and so 
short that when they raised their hands to steady the 
baskets upon their heads, the bare bronze skin of 
their lithe, graceful bodies was revealed to the waist- 
line. For skirts they only wear hand-woven cloths, 
gay with patterns, wrapped closely round their hips 
— so tightly, indeed, that every movement of their 
shapely limbs is disclosed as they walk along. 

The gorges grew deeper as we ascended, and in 
their glens, half hidden in a tangle of creepers, vines, 
and flowering yucca, we could see great tree-ferns 
spreading their tops like giant umbrellas. The vol- 
canic mountains took on strange shapes, and pres- 
ently we found ourselves upon the reedy banks of 
the broad lake, Amatitlan, along which the train 
now ran for many miles, crossing it at one point upon 
a long low bridge. We were by this time nearly four 
thousand feet above the sea, and the air was de- 
liciously cool and refreshing after the humid atmos- 
phere of the coast. 

At Moran, whose ruined church by the track 
stood a silent witness to the devastation of an earth- 
quake, we knew we were approaching the capital, 

[250] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

for women hurried along toward the city with their 
market produce balanced upon their heads and 
gaudy new villas came into view from time to time. 
We crossed the viaduct that spans the broad Re- 
forma, and entered the station. 

Upon emerging the first object that confronts you 
is the bull-ring made of adobe, washed with their 
favourite pale-blue water-colour. Opposite it, con- 
victs were at work grading a hill under the surveil- 
lance of some slovenly, barefoot soldiers. Beyond we 
passed a pilgrim church situated at the head of a 
great flight of steps, at whose base cows were being 
milked, while the crenellated walls of an old fortress 
rose up behind, blue and unreal against the sky-line 
like some piece of stage scenery. 

The streets down which we drove were wide and 
straight and paved with square blocks of stone like 
the old Roman thoroughfares; the houses but one 
story in height for the most part; the churches 
baroque, pretentious, and uninteresting. 

When I asked the cabman upon reaching the hotel 
how much I owed him, he calmly replied: "Eighteen 
dollars." I fairly gasped, feeling that I was being 
robbed. Then I remembered that in Guatemala 

[251] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

eighteen dollars of their money equals just one 
American dollar! You can imagine the condition 
of one's pockets in a country with such a currency — 
constantly cluttered with rolls of dirty paper pesos, 
tattered and often worn to shreds. You buy a few 
postage stamps and you pay eight dollars for them; 
your simple dinner amounts to forty dollars, your 
room to fifty dollars a day. Yet living in Gua- 
temala is cheap — when you make due allowance for 
exchange. 

Under the old Spanish dominion, all that we now 
call Central America, that is from the Isthmus of 
Tehuantepec to Panama, was known as the Captain- 
Generalcy, or Kingdom of Guatemala. Cortez, after 
his conquest of Mexico, sent his daring lieutenant, 
Don Pedro de Alvarado, one of the most brilliant 
figures of that turbulent epoch, to subjugate this 
country, and his name has become linked with it like 
that of Cortez with Mexico and Pizarro with Peru. 
He found the country peopled with fairly civilised 
natives, having their industries and arts, their pic- 
ture-writings and a primitive language of symbols. 
Like the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru, 
they dwelt upon the cool ethereal heights of the 

[252] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

tierra templada, where they first woke to civilisation 
under the stimulus of the exhilarating air raised high 
above the miasmas of the coast — the torrid tierra 
caliente. 

When Alvarado had brought these natives to sub- 
mission, he planned to make his capital the finest in 
the new world. To attain this end, he brought artisans 
from Spain, and under their guidance, the Mayas, 
who had erected the temples of Yucatan and Hon- 
duras, now built his viceregal palace, the great cathe- 
dral where his bones afterward reposed, and the other 
edifices of his capital, Antigua, situated almost at 
the base of Agua. In 1776, however, a terrific 
earthquake shook the city to its foundations, de- 
stroying it so utterly that by order of the government 
the capital was transferred to Guatemala City, and 
Antigua remains to this day a city of ruins. It is 
comparatively easy of access, and I should have liked 
to visit it, but the shortness of our stay would not 
permit the journey. 

Thus, as Spanish-American capitals go, Guatemala 
City is of comparatively recent origin, whence its ba- 
roque architecture, its tawdry palaces and churches. 
But it makes amends for these. The surrounding 

[253] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

country is wholly delightful, and has always been 
fittingly known as the "Paradise of the New World." 
Its elevation above the sea gives it a delicious climate, 
and its picturesque, if somewhat slovenly, inhabit- 
ants afford no end of variety. 

The Plaza de Armas, differing in this respect from 
those we had seen in South America, is ill kept, its 
pavement cracked and dirty, its trees dusty and neg- 
lected. Two sides are bordered by portales shelter- 
ing the principal shops under their arcades. To the 
east rise the great cathedral and the bishop's palace, 
while to the west stands the Palace, the official 
residence of President Cabrera, who holds the coun- 
try under his iron thumb. 

In an automobile we toured the city and its en- 
virons, first visiting, at the end of a broad avenue, 
flanked by villas and foreign legations, the Hipo- 
dromo, or Temple of Minerva, a modern edifice of 
the Greek type, used for scholastic or athletic exer- 
cises and public gatherings of all sorts, overlooking 
a beautiful ravine and a richly wooded country — a 
perfect tangle of tropic growth. 

In the opposite direction we returned to the Cal- 
vario, or Pilgrim Church, that I have mentioned, 

[254] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

passed the pale-blue Fortezza, and then followed the 
Avenida de la Reforma, a splendid boulevard shaded 
by quadruple rows of trees, mostly pines, that fill 
the air with their aromatic perfume. 

At its far extremity, we enjoyed a superb view of 







■oc&JZLli 



The Calvario, Guatemala City 

Agua topping the rich fields, and then we inspected 
the Museo. This contains a well-ordered if rather 
scant collection of plaster casts of the Maya bas- 
reliefs and monoliths from Quirigua, Peten, and the 
hidden jungles of Yucatan; modern historic souvenirs 
of the various revolutions; examples of native in- 

[255] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

dustries and some fine specimens of animals and 
birds, among the latter the quetzal, the national bird 
of freedom, larger than a parrot and like it contrast- 
ing a bright-red breast and a long green tail. 




Cathedral Terrace, Guatemala City 

The market that morning and the band concert that 
afternoon afforded an excellent opportunity to study 
the women and their gay attire. There were Guate- 
maltecans of Spanish origin in their prettiest Sunday 
raiment, mestizas in soft, pale-tinted scarfs, and, most 

[Z5Q] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

interesting of all perhaps, Indian women, especially 
those from Quezaltenango and its vicinity, many of 




sr? o x t o,i"-.\ d 



A Marimbero 



whom are employed as nurse-maids in the capital. 
They are small but well formed and erect from their 

[257] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 



habit of balancing loads upon their head; their 
clothes are hand-woven and enriched with lively and 
varied patterns; their hair is plaited with flowers, 

and their faces 



are often dis- 
tinctly comely. 

Among these 
women the 
slouchy soldiers 
wandered; a mal- 
imbero lugged 
his heavy instru- 
ment, a sort of 
xylophone, upon 
his back, and 
boys peddled na- 
tive sweetmeats 
stuck upon a 
stick, and can- 
dies fashioned in the semblance of men and animals. 
As the twilight deepened, the cathedral doors swung 
open and a crowd with lighted candles issued from 
the main portal, accompanying a Purisima or small, 
doll-like Virgin, such as one commonly sees in Mex- 

[258] 




Indian Women 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

ico, overdressed in brocades and laces, and so decked 
with jewels and ornaments that nothing but its di- 
minutive waxen face was visible. 

We took the early train for the lowlands, planning 
to spend the entire day en route, reaching Retalhuleu 
at six to spend the night, and the following morning 
we were to proceed to Champerico to meet our 
steamer. Though the distance from Retalhuleu to 
the coast is but twenty -five miles, only three trains 
a week make the connection. 

The trip through the jungle I shall not soon forget, 
both for the beauty of the long ride and for the ad- 
venture that closed it. 

The road from Guatemala City as far as Escuintla 
was a repetition of our ascent from the coast, but for 
the fact that, upon the downward journey, Agua 
stood revealed in all its majesty, rearing its perfect 
cone, sharp and regular, more than twelve thousand 
feet above the sea. Behind it towered its two neigh- 
bours, even greater in height though more distant, 
Fuego and Acatenango, volcanoes also, cutting their 
sharp silhouettes against a cloudless sky — forming 
the great trinity that decorates the country's coat- 
of-arms. 

[259] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

We had an early luncheon in the station at Es- 
cuintla, luckily, from what followed, an excellent 
repast graced with the finest avocado pears I have 
ever tasted. 

At Santa Maria Junction the train left the road to 
the coast, turning aside upon what will some day be 
the main line of the Pan-American Railway that 
eventually will connect the cities of the United States 
with Panama by rail — a dream that fascinated the 
mind of James G. Blaine, who was one of its strongest 
early advocates. At the present day such large 
portions of it already exist that its realisation no 
longer seems a dream but a reality of the not very 
distant future. 

The piece we were now traversing has been open 
but a year or two and passes through a virgin jungle, 
affording a ride of rare novelty and charm. You 
plunge almost instantly into a tropical forest whose 
moist, heavy atmosphere is as steamy as that of a 
hothouse. Its giant trees are hung with vines and 
snake-like creepers and bound about by the iron 
thongs of the lignum-vitse. Orchids balance them- 
selves upon the twisted limbs, and royal palms rear 
their column-like trunks among the thick underbrush. 

[260] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

At each station rough-looking peons left the 
second-class coaches to work on the fincas, or planta- 
tions, all their worldly possessions in packs upon their 
backs. Their foremen and their employers, the 
haciendados, go about armed to the teeth, looking 
like walking arsenals, with their cartridge-belts, their 
pistols, and their long, ugly knives. 

Our train conductor was an American, whose won- 
derful gold teeth proclaimed that fact to all the 
world. He had lived, I think he said, for twenty 
years along this Guatemala Central Railroad, and 
he retailed to us all the gossip of the road, pointing 
out the big sugar estates, the mahogany logs at 
Buena Vista, the rubber-trees, and, later on, the 
coffee plantations sheltered from the sun by the leaf- 
age of the jungle. He told us, too, where to get the 
best pineapples (most refreshing upon a journey like 
this), and we bought, by his advice, nine of them for 
twenty-seven reales, or seven cents gold, and cocoa- 
nuts at about a cent and a half apiece. 

The native villages were a source of constant in- 
terest, with their bamboo huts thatched with palm 
leaves, their primitive outdoor kitchens, where we 
saw armadillos roasted whole like Chinese sucking 

[261] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

pigs. Children played about as nature made them; 
the men, especially toward Patulul, were clad only 
in richly coloured breech-cloths that harmonised per- 




flate in the Jungle 

fectly with their warm brown skins, and the women 
were washing half nude in the streams. 

River after river, rippling over pebbly beds, ran 
from the mountains to the sea, and one after another 
we crossed them: the various branches of the Coyo- 
lata, the two main forks of the Madre Vie jo, the 
Nahualate, the Nima, and the lean. Their presence 
explained the fertility of the region and the rich 

[262] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

verdure of the country, despite the fact that we were 
at the end of the long dry season, when one would 
naturally expect to see the land seared and scorched 
by the sun, ardently awaiting the rain. 

At Mazatenango we lost a passenger who had 
greatly interested us — a beautiful mestizo,, upon 
whose shoulders two green parakeets had perched 
all day. It was now nearly five o'clock, and only an 
hour's ride separated us from our destination for the 
night. During this last portion of the trip we passed 
through extensive coffee fincas that form the principal 
source of wealth of the region, arriving at Retalhuleu 
just on time. 

Lucky for us that we did so. 

I have spoken of Guatemala's despotic president, 
Cabrera. We had had instances before of the close 
watch that is kept by his officials on every stranger 
and every citizen, for our names had been taken each 
time we passed in or out of a railroad station or 
entered a hotel. Here, at Retalhuleu, the officials 
advanced again for these formalities, and when I had 
signed my name I was surprised to see them exchange 
a look, and one of them handed me two telegrams. 
Both were from the captain of our ship, urging us to 

[263] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

hire a special train and get to Champerico at once, 
as he sailed at eight o'clock that evening. 

What visions his telegram evoked ! In fancy I saw 
us stranded for ten days in this desolate port with 
nothing but our hand-luggage; I saw our tickets for 
the voyage reposing, with our other possessions, in 
the purser's safe; I saw us following forlornly by the 
next steamer, which was the worst boat on the line. 

So, without losing a single moment, I interviewed 
the station-master, he called up the central office in 
Guatemala City, catching the officials just before 
they left for the night, and I watched the reply 
slowly tick from the telegraphic instrument — the 
order for a special at what looked like a ruinous 
figure until it was divided into American dollars. 
The only car that they could find available was a 
second-class coach, and in twenty minutes after our 
arrival an engine was attached to it, a dim, smoky 
lamp was lighted in one of its corners, and we started 
off, dinnerless, in the night. 

What a wild ride it was! The locomotive snorted 
like a raging monster at the very door of our coach, 
that rocked from side to side like an unballasted ship 
upon the shaky rails; the lamp spluttered and smoked 

[264] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

and threatened every instant to fall from its fixture 
and smash upon the floor. 

The lights of native huts (for it was still early in 
the evening) flashed by in the darkness. Anxious 
faces peered through the windows as we slowed down 
at the few stations. Such a thing as a train at night 
was unknown upon this road, that, as I have said, 
operates but three trains a week in each direction, 
and these only in broad daylight. Our whistle 
shrieked as we sped along, and at last, in record time, 
we pulled into the station at Champerico. 

I think the whole town was there to meet us. I 
know the entire garrison was, barefooted doubtless, 
but with fixed bayonets, prepared to quell any revo- 
lution that might emerge from this lone coach. 
Their anxiety faded, but their curiosity was evidently 
increased, when they beheld only two mild-mannered 
persons step out. Guessing our object, they called 
repeatedly: "You cannot embark; you cannot em- 
bark." However, the port agent met us, some natives 
took up our luggage, and we stumbled along over the 
railroad tracks and switches in the direction of the 
mole. 

The captain of the port had been forewarned, for 

[265] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

nothing short of the President's permission had been 
necessary to enable us to leave the country after 
nightfall. So, as he expressed it, "in honour of the 
lady," he came himself with his small court, all dressed 
in white, to take us to the bodega on the end of the 
mole. Four boatmen, also in white, were waiting 
there, and the captain's big chaloupa was in readiness 
to be swung out and down into the long Pacific roll- 
ers which fortunately were exceptionally quiet that 
evening. The boat was duly launched, my wife was 
put into a sort of barrel-chair, and at the end of a 
crane was swung out into the darkness and care- 
fully lowered into the waiting boat, then I was sent 
down in the same manner. 

The ship's lights twinkled in the distance, shut out 
at times by a long black wave-wall that disappeared 
as quickly as it came. We seemed to float upon a 
moving black void with silvery phosphorescence all 
about and dripping from the oars. Once out of the 
ground-swell, however, we glided peacefully along 
toward the ship's golden lamps that beckoned us like 
the hospitable lights of some large hotel. 

We met the purser's boat coming ashore to see 
how we were faring, and then we knew, what we 

[266] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

had already guessed, the reason for the change of 
plans that had necessitated this brusque departure — 
namely, that in this calm weather the steel rails for 
Champerico had rained into the lighters in double- 
quick time, and the ship was ready for departure 
Monday night instead of Tuesday morning. 

On awaking next day we found ourselves anchored 
off Ocos, the last port of call in Guatemala. Only a 
mile or two to the north lay the Mexican border. 
Nothing tempted us to go ashore at this forlorn port, 
and indeed we were quite well pleased, after the past 
three days' activities, to sit quietly in our steamer- 
chairs upon the open deck and watch the lighters 
filled with sacks of coffee come one after the other 
out through the surf, whose breakers they breasted 
by an ingenious system of cables attached to buoys, 
giving their signals to the men in charge of the don- 
key-engine ashore by means of black and white flags. 

Toward night great clouds gathered about the 
mountains inland and the lightning flashed dull 
silver in the deepening gloom. The stars disappeared 
one by one; a high wind arose; big warm splashes of 
rain pattered on the deck, and before we knew it a 
chuvasco — one of those great tropical storms that 

[267] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

come so quickly in these latitudes — was let loose 
about us. In a moment floods of water swept the 
ship from stem to stern. But all was over as quickly 
as it came, and in a few hours the stars twinkled 
again overhead. 



[268] 



Ill 

COAST TOWNS OF MEXICO 

AT eleven o'clock next morning the two thou- 
/Jk sand sacks of coffee were all aboard and we 
-** ^ said good-bye to Guatemala. 

A little later we passed the first port in Mexico, 
San Benito, marked by a warehouse or two upon the 
shore. The long, low thread of coast continued to 
unroll itself all the afternoon, with now and then a 
faint, blue mountain form dimly seen hiding its head 
in thunder-clouds. We passed two steamers — a rare 
event upon this silent sea. 

Before dawn next day we heard the high wind 
whistling about our cabin, the trades that always 
blow in the Gulf of Tehuantepec. After breakfast 

[269] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

we anchored in the outer bay of Salina Cruz, and 
came up to the dock soon after, watching with in- 
terest, as we did so, the crowd of Mexican carga- 
doreSy in white jeans and the national peaked hats, 
preparing to unload our cargo. This was the first 
time we had been alongside a dock since we left 
Balboa, and was to be the last until we arrived in 
San Francisco. 

Each town along this coast seems to have a 
physiognomy all its own. Some are but a collection 
of tropical shacks shaded by cocoanut palms; others 
have a prosperous air displayed in their mountains 
of coffee-sacks and bags of sugar; others again wear 
an ugly face devoid even of the interest of character. 
Salina Cruz is certainly one of these, for no element 
of beauty can be found in its windy, sand-swept 
streets. But she has dressed her unattractive face 
in very neat and business-like clothes — her excellent 
wharves and docks, built by a great English corpora- 
tion, equipped with all the modern machinery and 
appliances that are lacking even in some of our most 
up-to-date American ports. Electric cranes, running 
easily on tracks, swing their giant arms in air, lift- 
ing from the ships' holds great handfuls of bales and 

[270] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

boxes and emptying them directly, as the case may 
be, either into freight cars standing ready to take 
them across the Isthmus to the Gulf or into solid 
warehouses ranged along the quay. Salina Cruz 




A Bullock Wagon, Salina Cruz 

was the proposed western terminus of the famous 
ship railway so much discussed some years ago as 
the only possible solution of the canal problem. 

Whether this Tehuantepec Railway, with its trans- 
shipments, will be able to compete with the direct 

[271 ] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

route of the Panama Canal is the question one natu- 
rally asks one's self. The town of Tehuantepec, 
which gives its name to the Isthmus, lies about 
twenty miles inland, and is famous for the beauty 
and the curious national dress of its women. To 
judge from those we saw in Salina Cruz, I should 
say they justify their reputation. 

We sailed early Friday morning and headed up 
the Mexican coast. The sea was alive, with turtles, 
gleaming like great topazes upon the calm blue 
waters. 

What a change in the shore-line from the softly 
wooded hills of Guatemala! All was bleak and arid, 
rugged and firmly modelled. Low headlands thrust 
themselves into the sea, girt with jagged rocks and 
clothed with dry underbrush, and great clusters of 
the organ cactus reared their bright-green fingers 
straight toward heaven. At other times long white 
lines of sand skirted with foliage connected these 
headlands, and once in a while a broad verdant 
valley opened and a wreath of blue smoke proclaimed 
a human presence. One of these valleys stretched 
its mouth so wide that we coasted for about half an 
hour along its unbroken beach, walled with cocoanut 

[272] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

palms and backed by densely wooded hills, rising 
one behind another, fold after fold, peering over each 
other, as it were, to catch a glimpse of the sea, while 
the mother range — the Sierra Madre — looked calmly 
down upon her children from her cool ethereal heights. 

Then the coast receded until it almost disappeared 
from view, then protruded again far out into the sea 
until we seemed to be heading directly for its yellow 
cliffs. No opening appeared until we came quite 
close, when, of a sudden, a narrow passage split the 
cliffs and we entered a landlocked harbor, the love- 
liest on all this coast. 

What memories cling about this bay of Acapulco, 
as perfect in form as any saucer, with but a single 
chip in all its rim, that of the narrow boca that 
admits ships from the sea! Purple hills enclose it; 
groves of cocoanut palms skirt its shores; native 
huts lie cool in the shadows of the woods, and over 
to the northward the old town of Acapulco spreads 
itself upon a hill-slope behind its ancient Spanish 
fortress. 

What pictures it has beheld! The dromonds and 
the galliases from Panama, with the merchants of 
Spain and the traders from the vice-royalty of Peru, 

[273 ] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

assembled to buy the silks and porcelains from China 
and the spices from the Indies; the nobles and their 
caravans from Mexico City just across the moun- 
tains, even at times the viceroy himself, come to 
welcome the King's ship — the great galleon that 
once a year arrived from Manila freighted with the 
treasures of the Orient, its sails gay with painted 
images, its waist bristling with cannon, its rigging 
hung with ollas, earthen jars, to catch and cool the 
rain-water upon its lengthy voyage. 

During the old regime Acapulco was the chief port 
upon the Pacific for the East-Indian trade, and this 
great galleon, commanded by a general who flew the 
royal standard at his masthead, left each year for 
the Philippines in March, returning the following 
December or January. 

Bret Harte has founded one of his most important 
poems upon this event, a curious legend beginning 
thus: 

"In sixteen hundred and forty-one 
The regular yearly galleon, 
Laden with odorous gums and spice, 
India cotton and India rice, 
And the richest silks of far Cathay, 
Was due at Acapulco Bay." 

[274] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

This "Lost Galleon" never arrived for a very- 
peculiar reason, and he concludes his account of its 
ill-fated voyage with the following prophecy of the 
Holy Brotherhood: that in 1939, just three hundred 
years from the date it was due, 

"The folk in Acapulco town, 
Over the waters looking down, 
Will see in the glow of the setting sun 
The sails of the missing galleon 
And the royal standard of Philip Rey, 
The gleaming mast and the glistening spar, 
As she nears the reef of the outer bar." 

If this prophecy is fulfilled, her captain-general, 
upon his return, will not find the old town greatly 
changed, for to-day its buildings still echo the His- 
panic taste of the seventeenth century. Its old 
fortress of San Diego still bristles with antiquated 
artillery, the old craft of its harbour are primitive, 
and its shiftless people, cut off from all communica- 
tion with the outside world, fill in the foreground of 
the picture in quite an appropriate manner. But he 
will rub his eyes in bewilderment when he reads the 
name, to him meaningless, of the boats that come to 
ferry one ashore: the New York, the Maryland, the 
George Washington, and the Flying-Fish. 

[275] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

We chose the first named, and soon were landing at 
the custom-house, which you literally "pass through" 
to leave the landing-stage, and found ourselves in the 
main plaza, set out with fine mango-trees. The after- 




Its Streets of Dazzling Colonnades 

noon was all too short for this picturesque old town, 
with its streets and dazzling colonnades, its cool por- 
ticos, its markets and shops filled with a bright 
jumble of pottery and ponchos, woven baskets and 
tropical fruits. 

[276] 




Market Square, Acapulco 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

We sketched and visited the agency and the con- 
sulate, occupying two of the most pretentious houses 
in the town, both typically Spanish, with patios and 




An Outlying Street, Acapulco 



great airy chambers whose windows are barred with 
solid rejas strong enough for a prison. 

At sundown we were towed in the agent's boat to 
our ship, which had meanwhile gone across the bay 

[277] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

to coal. The evening was delightful, the air balmy 
yet refreshing, and the calm bay, landlocked, with 
but its single exit to the sea, spread its opalescent 
waters to catch the sky reflections — pink, green, 
lavender, and mauve. The American consul had 
come out with us — a distinguished-looking man with 
a young face and snow-white hair — and he and the 
agent dined at the captain's table, and we all spent 
the evening together up under the bridge by the 
captain's cabin. 

The coal-barges lay alongside, and in the fitful light 
of electric reflectors we could see the passers, a motley 
crew, half naked, grimy, black by nature or by dust, 
one could not tell which, shovelling the coal like 
demons, in the weird night light. 

Our next Mexican port was Manzanillo, whose 
lighthouse, perched upon a bluff, was the first that we 
had remarked on all the coast. We ran in close under 
it, swung into a wide and beautiful gulf, and anchored 
behind a fine, new breakwater, where lies the little 
town, the western terminal of one of the Mexican 
railways, straggling along a sand-bar. We went 
ashore on principle, but found little to interest us 
except some pretty juegos, or sets of Guadalajara 

[278] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

pottery— bottle, plate, and drinking-cup, made to 
match. The town is dirty and unattractive, the 
country dry and desolate. 

There remained but one more port of call, San 
Bias, and a tiny pearl of the tropics it is, set in shores 




~5% 



ManzaniUo Bay 



of vivid green and groves of palm-trees. We cast 
anchor a mile or two offshore, near a British gun- 
boat, and immediately a boat put off from her and one 
of her officers came to call upon our captain. What 
a trim boat's crew it was — how spick and span their 
uniforms, how well fed, how ruddy their complexions 

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PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

under their cork helmets after the sallow skins of 
the Central Americans we had been seeing! 

Our steamer had two thousand bunches of bananas 
to take aboard, so we went ashore for the afternoon 



/ ^ 




A Tiny Pearl of the Tropics 

in a big surf -boat, riding the breakers to shelter behind 
a primitive breakwater. Here we found ourselves in 
a calm lagoon, broken by numerous sand-spits and 
stretching off into bayous of rich tropical vegetation. 

[280] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

Sturdy cargadores were loading big lighters with ba- 
nanas and dried fish, and beyond we could see the first 
bamboo huts of the village roofed with palm-leaves. 




. <= f .T< ^c"^ , 



Old Church, San Bias 



A few Mexican buildings were mingled with them, 
but they recalled the Moor, rather than the Spaniard, 
with their blank walls, their roof terraces, and pink 

[281] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

arcades. There was little to do but peep into the 
native huts like those of South Sea Islanders, drink 
cocoanut milk, visit the market, where we were offered 
a whole bunch of bananas for fifteen cents gold, and 
then wander down to the beach, where the natives 
were swimming, riding the surf on boards like 
Kanakas and having a splendid time. This quiet 
afternoon was altogether a charming farewell to the 
tropics. Even the sunset, as we returned to the ship, 
was sufficiently lurid and full of colour to meet the 
requirements of the occasion, and as we stood out 
for the open sea it was with deep regret that we said 
good-bye to the heat and discomfort, the glamour 
and charm, of the southern seas. 

Never shall I forget the romance of those nights at 
sea — the long talks with our captain up under the 
bridge, his lines from Kipling's "Seven Seas," the 
stars that twinkled their thousand eyes overhead, 
and the great calm Pacific that stretched to infinity, 
its broad bosom faintly heaving in its slumberous 
breathing. 

After leaving San Bias we cut across the mouth of 
the Gulf of California, and toward sundown rounded 
the southern extremity of Cape St. Lucas. That 

[282] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

night we crossed the tropic of Cancer. The Southern 
Cross, that had so long guided us, disappeared from 
the firmament, the North Star stood high in the 
heavens, and in the morning when we arose a brac- 
ing north wind greeted us. 








r-Tfct-* & ^ 



, ^ c.u i/."n D 



Loading Barges, San Bias 



The officers appeared dressed in navy blue instead 
of the white of the tropics. Activity and energy 
developed in the crew. Even the passengers awoke 
from their drowsiness, threw off the lethargy of the 
steamer-chairs, and took long walks forward and aft. 
Lower California unrolled its naked headlands, the 
great bluffs of Magdalena Bay arose along the sea. 
Sometimes the coast was low and sandy; sometimes 

[283] 



PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 

table-lands stretched flat for miles, as if their tops had 
been lopped off by giant machetes; sometimes high 
and wicked cliffs lifted their walls along the shore, 
scarred and seamed, with the surf pounding along 
their feet. Many a good ship has foundered on this 
wild coast, with no lights, even to-day, to guide them 
in the night, with no siren to warn them in the fog, 
their ribs mouldering along the treacherous rock- 
bound shore. 

Beyond Cape San Rocco and Cedro Island we 
passed the deep curve of Viscaino's Bay, and followed 
the course of that intrepid navigator, until one morn- 
ing — the fourth, I think, from San Bias — the peak of 
Catalina Island rose above our port bow. Shoals of 
flying-fish frolicked in the water and, as the land 
drew nearer, fishing-smacks skimmed over the danc- 
ing waves, their sails bellying in the fresh westerly 
trades. 

After the inhospitable coast of Lower California, 
our own shores looked verdant and animated. At 
night an unbroken chain of lighthouses guided our 
course. By day the great cliffs that skirt the sea 
frowned down upon us. 

And then one morning, with the earliest dawn, the 

[284] 



THE ISTHMUS TO THE GOLDEN GATE 

twinkling beam of San Benito's lighthouse lured 
us on, and the faint silhouette of the Farallones rose 
to the westward. We changed our course, coasting 
close in under the cliffs, and as the sun rose behind 
the Contra Costa hills, flooding the headlands with 
the glory of its effulgence, we entered the Golden 
Gate, and the broad waters of the bay of San Fran- 
cisco opened their arms to us. 



[285] 



OCT 7 19IS 




